Wedding recap, Part 1: Aftermath, plus The week before

I’ve needed more time than I anticipated to get ready to write these recaps. The wedding and everything around it did a little bit of a number on me. The first out-of-towners arrived 10 days before the wedding; the last of them left 4 days after the wedding. That’s two solid weeks of thinking about the logistics of hosting and entertaining guests, and that’s a pretty damn tall order even when you’re not also getting married.

It did get to me in the end. My mood got a little unstable, and I might have done a spot or two of spontaneous, this-is-all-too-much type crying, when it was the Tuesday after the wedding and we’d made it through but there were still seven guests staying in our two bedroom apartment, and I needed sleep like a baby needs…sleep, and I ran away to a friend’s place to have a nap. That might have happened, I can neither confirm nor deny. By the time the last people left, late on Wednesday night, my body was starting to show signs of illness, and then I spent the whole night and next day with a fever, moaning about feeling simultaneously too hot and too cold and having zero appetite, which was an outstanding way to spend M’s last day before going back to work, which was also coincidentally the first time we had together in a two week period that had included marrying each other.

But I do feel better now. And now that I’ve had a chance to get a little perspective on it, I can see that my crumbling at the end was an expected response to the circumstances. Here’s the problem: having a whole bunch of people suddenly come visit at once takes up a lot of time, and leaves no space for actually getting stuff done.

In the run up to the first people arriving I was buzzing around trying to cross off things on my to do list (remind me to write about The Saga of the Dress), but not everything was finished before they got here. Eh, I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find 20 minutes one evening with my fiance to write our joint thank you speech, or to take my mom with me when we stocked up on all the booze we needed for the wedding, or to go buy the flowers and then hang out with my bridesmaids while we assemble them into bouquets.

But nope. Of course, that is not how it works. Instead, what happens in these situations is that you spend an hour getting twelve people to agree on where to have dinner, and then another hour getting them there, even though it is a 10 minute walk away. This one is walking slowly and is lagging behind, this one is eager to go and forges ahead but gets lost, these two decided to take a detour, someone else is too hot and is unhappy.

The good news is, even though the people were work, they were also reassuring. The low background hum of panic in my head did in fact subside for a while when my mom and bridesmaid arrived. The wedding stopped seeming so abstract and became just a thing I was going to do with my best supporters around me. We were going to have fun, and everything was going to be ok.

And though I wish I could have held onto that feeling for longer, there were lots of wonderful parts to that week. Spending a good chunk of time giggling like a crazy person over very silly things with bridesmaid R, taking my brother B with me to do  the final try on of the dress and him approving of it, hanging out at the pool while our various friends from different parts of our life met each other, and them telling us afterwards, “your friends are so cool!”

And being looked after. My mom dispatched me to a nail salon for a mani-pedi. Local friend Z, who is a makeup genius, volunteered to do my wedding makeup and we did a trial and she did a brilliant job. Local friend V who is better than me at hair came over, and then helped me get closer to working out what the hell to do with my hair. There was my hen’s night.

Definitely there were good times, but there was also a lot of pressure, self-imposed, to make sure everyone was enjoying themselves enough, and there was not going a minute without being asked another question, and there was no time out alone or with my man, and stuff on my to do list was not getting done. Stuff got shoved aside for later – We’ll do this on Bintan! Once we get there everything will be easy! My mom assured me that online she had found out there was a booze shop close to the resort to get all the drinks from. Surely we’d easily find time to write the speech. It would be no problem to finish off our playlist, to edit the processional song to something usable, or to do everything else that was still undone.

Everything would work out.

 

 

(It didn’t really all work out.)