In hindsight, we should have gotten a videographer. We thought it was cheesy and something we would never end up watching but now, neither of us remembers what happened because it all happened so quickly!
It seems, the parts I recall best are some of the things I would like to forget the most. its been 30 days and married life is great but really no different than the last 5 of 7 years together. The wedding was great, not many complaints. We got really lucky and the forecast for storms changed the night before, we ended up with a gorgeous, warm and sunny day. It was a Catholic ceremony and I am not Catholic, yet, so I didn't know most of the responses and we both blanked out and forgot the "greeting of the families" portion, but we laughed about it with our priest immediately afterwards. No one else noticed, of course. It also turned out that the banquet manager was not the same person as the coordinator as we had been lead to believe so quite a few details were messed up at the reception but mostly minor ones. The only thing that upset me was that they did not follow the diagram I provided for place cards at the captain's table, so my grandparents were not sitting next to me as I had planned. The other stuff had me fuming for a week or so but I wrote my reviews and got over it. You must be wondering what I have to vent about...
It was a black tie event inside of a museum and we had a much larger than average budget (paid ourselves, not parental help), especially for the region (not bragging, just setting the scene) and only about 140 guests. It's important to note that I wore Vera Wang, the Dorothy dress in ivory but with the painted tulle. Also, important to understand that my dad's sister has always been more of a mother figure to me and was especially "there for me" with everything wedding related.
My husband and I stayed in a large hotel suite the night before and in the morning everyone came up to get ready there (BP, mothers and grandmothers) and get hair and make up done. That's when it started.
My mother ducked out several times to go smoke and when she was around she would not stop repeating how she wanted to look "young", have "a young hairstyle" and "young make-up". She had been a pain leading up to the wedding with her dress because of her desperate desire to look young and other antics. For example, I offered to buy her dress and she refused, but then did not buy the dress she loved because "it was too much money".
Ceremony begins. Everyone cries except my mother, so some people were looking at her strangely. We start photos and she keeps holding things up because she is worried about how she looks. Everyone leaves and goes back to the hotel before us, we stayed for more photos, then went back and had a small lunch. I couldn't get a hold of my parents because my mom, according to my sister, insisted on going to lunch at a restaurant in the hotel instead of getting room service with us. We are getting ready to leave for the museum and I get a text from my mom asking when she is supposed to leave (there is a party bus for all of them and I have already passed out schedules of arrival and departure times). I tell her in a text and then she calls me and is yelling at me wanting to know what time to leave. Uh, yeah. and my brother texts me right after to tell me that he told her when to leave and she just didn't want to leave that early. I found out later that her and her sister ended up holding up the bus from leaving the hotel so they were all late to the reception (all parents, grandparents, WP and some aunts and uncles).
We get through dinner and cut the cake right away. My mom starts having a fit about something and my dad had to walk her away from the party so, my husband had to go run, literally run, around this massive museum to find my dad for our father-daughter dance. Then the real fun began. My mother began to get completely wasted. She was dancing on chairs. She was shouting. She would dance up behind my dad's co-workers and do what can only be described as vibrate until they noticed and danced away from her. She grabbed my MIL by the arm and pulled her to the dance floor, slurring something about dancing together and then danced away, tripping over her dress that was never properly fitted and strappless, thus falling off of her. She also began going around telling people that she didn't understand why people wouldn't dance with her and, with out realizing I was sitting there, telling people that I was avoiding her and was a b***h.
People were rolling their eyes at her and telling me how sorry they were.
The best part, though... back before dinner started, my aunt came to bustle my dress for me. She knew how and had even marked the ties the first time she did it. My mom, who was not interested in my dress until now, insisted on helping. She tied 3 of the 8 ties. She did not tie them correctly at all. I can't even describe the mess completely. She had fabric pulled through this loop in the tulle that ripped the tulle, she had a tie from one layer tied to one in another layer. They kept coming undone and the underside of my dress was apparently showing all night. The best part, once she was drunk, it came undone and she stepped on it, ripping the top layer out at the seam along the entire front of the dress.
I have a hard time talking to her now. We have never been close but she was so rude and so embarrassing, it makes it hard to even fake it now. What is worse, is she now suddenly wants to chat all of the time and has taken to calling me "baby girl".
Thanks for letting me rant. I don't expect advice or anything. I just needed to get that out.