I Would Like to Be A Conformist Lemming, Please!

[ladysprite]

I love my fiance with a deep and abiding passion. I love my friends and family, and I love the fact that I'm getting married. I love my pretty wedding gown, and the ceremony writing is actually starting to fall into place, and the chance to celebrate with several dozen of my nearest and dearest is just marvelous.

That said, this entire wedding rigmarole is starting to annoy the bejeezus out of me. Here is an entire industry bent upon making you realize that you're broke, worthless, and all of your friends will hate you forever if you can't afford an open bar and a rehearsal dinner at La Expensiva.

I honestly wish I had a small fortune to fund this one day of my life. I wish I could afford to feed everyone I've ever met bottomless booze and lobster risotto and an entire raw cow apiece, with live music and free pony rides. Or, barring that, I wish I was cool enough and talented enough to just find an empty hall somewhere and sew my own dress and grow my own flowers and bake my own cake and weave tiny handmade baskets and fill them with tiny homemade chocolates for all my guests. But I'm not that rich, and I'm not that talented, and so I'm stuck with a wedding that is going to scream 'frugal' to everyone I know who was lucky enough to have family with money. And it just makes it worse every time my mother cries because she's going to have to live with her daughter having a wedding that's "good enough" instead of Storybook Perfect, because she keeps insisting that it's her fault for being a bad mother and refusing to believe me when I say that I'm happy with chicken for dinner and bagels for the rehearsal breakfast, which makes me feel like I'm a cheap bitch for being happy with that.

Stupid wedding. Stupid social pressure. Stupid inferiority complex. Stupid student loans and stupid low-paying job. Blah.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that your mother feels bad about this, but honestly that's her problem and not yours. I know she's a wonderful woman, and that she's very kind and generous, but in this her desire to make things perfect for you is interfering with what ought to be your happiness.

But I tell you, here and now, that your wedding will be Storybook Perfect. I know this, because I know the bride, and whether she is married wearing a flour sack or a satin gown, she will be the very essence of bridal beauty and perfection in that moment.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

her desire to make things perfect for you

I don't know ladysprite's mother, and so I could easily be wrong, but what I'm seeing is her desire to make things perfect for her, the heck with what ladysprite wants.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if I misphrased things, because that's not the impression I want to give at all.

My mother is a dear and an angel and a wonderful friend to me, and she honestly and truly wants me to have the bestest of everything. She wants this to be perfect for me, and to be perfectly what I want. Unfortunately, she also wants to be able to give me the sun and the moon and the stars, and she wants me to be able to have something huge and fancy. And she feels like she's a failure because she can't even offer me that.

She's not a failure. She's doing more than I thought she would be able to, and she's the reason we're at least having a catered reception instead of a potluck in our yard. But because she feels bad about not being able to drop five figures on my Special Day, I feel bad that my not being able to have that kind of wedding makes her feel bad, and it's a whole unfortunate spiral of guilt and upset.....

[siderea]

You mom may be a saint on earth, but the way she's behaving is contributing a lot to your feeling inadequate. Doesn't mean she doesn't love you or want the best for you, but it means she's caught up in her own drama to the exclusion of realizing what's going on with you.

Somebody needs to sit her down and have a serious talk with her. It may have to be you, but it's the sort of situation which cries out for female-relative intervention. Has she got a sister you're both close with? Or do you have a sister who's in a position to get involved?

Mother-daughter dynamics are -- no matter how good the relationship -- insane. No other relationship is so prone to bad boundaries; it's like we never really forget our bodies were once one being. Mothers look at their daughters and see themselves; daughters look at their mothers and see the whole world. It's hard for mothers and daughters to look at one another and actually see one another. It can require someone else to supply a word to the wise or a swift kick in the shins, as appropriate.

Sounds like your mom is thinking about all the Storybook dreams of her own that didn't come true, and sees in your not getting a "perfect" wedding a perpetration of an old injustice anew on her own daughter. Mothers often project themselves onto their daughters, their own disappointments and fantasies, and resolve to defend their daughters the way they felt they were never defended from the vagaries of life.

But daughters look at their mothers and see judgment. They want to live up to their mothers' esteem. So when their mothers are disappointed, they tend to feel it is because they have been the disappointment. Yearning-hoping for a favorable, merciful judgment, they offer their mothers the gentle, positive judgment they hope to receive in turn.

So here we are: your mother defending you against the injustice of you not having a "perfect" wedding, and you offering up the positive judgment that she's doing a great job.

It's a lot like that O. Henry story about the combs and the pocket watch.

Hmmmm. Here's an idea. Start being really demanding. Not of expensive things, but of just exactly the right thing. If you were to burst into tears that you'd always dreamed of having exactly this one particular shade of red peony in your wedding boquette, she'll have a quest to go on that will allow her to feel she's making your wedding perfect; she will tear apart the world looking for exactly the right red peonies to make her baby happy... and stop trying to find things for you to want. See, she's manufacturing standards because you haven't been providing them. If you said "the only things that will possibly do are..." she could get behind them, and it wouldn't matter that how much (or little) they cost.

Betcha been all "that's OK... no really..." right? If instead you were, "But I WANT my wedding to be in a small chapel. That's what I always dreamed of! It's MY day!" or whatever, you wouldn't get much argument.

This, now that I think about it, is exactly the tactic my sister used for controlling her wedding. :) She declared that she was going to have a "non-traditional" "modern" wedding. No, we had no idea what that meant, either. That way, she absolutely hamstrung clever tradition-based suggestions from third parties. She announced whatever constituted "non-traditional, modern" in weddings, and everyone had to roll with it, or look like pushy jerks. In that way, she was able to afford the wedding herself (one of her goals was to accept no parental money for the wedding.)