Please forgive me if this turns into a really long rant, but I need to vent and I need some guidance!
Let me first start out by stating that I never fathomed having a huge event of a wedding, but I have a huge family that I am close with that lives out of state, and I couldn't resist an excuse to get them to all come down here.
My FI and I both love aquariums, so it was only natural to want to get married at our local aquarium. The only thing was that you had to use their caterer, and it was kind of expensive, so we decided to look elsewhere, and found restaurant that would give us a private room for our whole party (about 50 people, all family, no friends) for only the cost of the food. My idea was to have the whole thing there, ceremony and all, since it would only be about $2500 and we are on a budget. I was fine with that, as the reception location was absolutely gorgeous and the food was fantastic.
My father, on the other hand, suggested that we have our ceremony at the aquarium (hard to resist) and have hors d'eourves at the aquarium to meet the minimum food order, and then hop the trolley that connects the aquarium to the area the restaurant is in for the reception. I told my father that I didn't know how we would be able to pay for it and he told me, "Don't worry about that, we'll figure that out later" and talked about pre-paying everyone's trolley tickets, renting me a limo, everything. So we put all our deposits down. My father makes six figures a year and tends to want to spend his money pretty freely. He works hard for it and he loves to spend it on his family, so I didn't really take issue with what he said. The original agreement was that my parents would pay for half of the wedding. Then they said they would pay for the aquarium (about $2300) and we would pay for the reception (about $2500). That was fine, until it occured to me that my parents no longer intended to pay for any of the other expenses of the wedding. We have the funds to pay for the cake, flowers, decorations, etc., on our own, but this meant we no longer had any funds available for a photographer or honeymoon. They say it is because they're not sure they'll have enough money.
This is really frustrating for me because 1) they lead us to believe they would be paying for these things before and after we committed to everything and 2) they just paid $7,000.00 for a dining set and put in a $4,000.00 deck on the back of their house in the past month, after we put down our deposits.
I'm trying so hard not to feel like an entitled brat, but I'm left wondering how we're going to pull this whole thing off now that they've pretty much said we're on our own. We never would have put our deposits down on everything otherwise, and we'll be out $1500 if we cancel.
I talked to my mom about canceling the restaurant, since it had the lowest deposit, and just serving heavy hors d'eourves at the aquarium to cut about $2000 off the total cost, and my mom went a little nuts, telling me that I'm making all our family fly down for the wedding and that I should be serving a whole meal: "it's not fair to them." I said I didn't know what to do at this point because we simply can not afford to serve a whole meal on our own, and she told me I had some "soulsearching to do." She hasn't worked in over 16 years and has just lived off what my dad makes, so I feel like she no longer realizes what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck. I feel like "soulsearching" means "conjure up more money" to her, because it's hard for her to fathom not having money. She's under the impression that we don't have enough money to pay for a $8,000.00 wedding because we live in excess, and that we could if we just "stopped going out to eat all the time." We eat in every night and haven't been to a movie in over a year. We make plenty of money, but we have bills to pay and we're working on fixing up our house. We're not about to fork over our entire savings for a single evening. I'm fine paying for my own wedding, I just wish that they hadn't lead us to believe they would be contributing more than they will be. We never asked for anything...
Anyway, my point is, is it seriously that big of a deal if we just serve heavy hors d'eourves and drinks instead of a full meal?? I'm thinking about getting a pretty significant variety of them....