Aftermath

I'm back in Toulouse now after our Saturday wedding in the Gard.

First, a huge thank you to Samantha for being my témoin.

So I imagine you all want to know how it went? I think I'll offer being two answers when they ask: simple and cliché, or the truth.

Simple and cliché is of course "It was great!"

And the truth: It wasn't my party. I felt like I was at someone else's birthday party but had suddenly become the hostess. It felt like it was my mother in law's event, and I just happened to be there. I had an okay time, with a few good laughs (thanks to the shennanigans of B's friends), and while nothing really went wrong, persay, there were too many straws on the camel's back. It was difficult to translate everything for my parents since they were the only ones who didn't understand. When B's friends sang a song they'd written about him incorporating lots of inside jokes and references to his past, I summarized the lyrics and didn't even try to translate everything. Poor B is babysitting them more or less this week until they meet up with an old friend on Saturday and spend the rest of their two weeks with her. At the risk of sounding like an ungrateful child, it's really a burden to have my parents visiting right now since we're so busy and they speak 2 words of French.

On the positive side, everyone looked good. My hair turned out really well, and I didn't have any clothing problems. B looked great in his suit, as did all his guy friends in theirs and Samantha in her dress.

As I was driving back this evening, I realized that my big mistake was thinking that the stress and problems related to weddings came from having lots of details and coordinating everything, and that if I just eliminated all those "extras", I would eliminate the problems. I thought that if I didn't have to choose chair-back ties, center pieces, bride's maid dresses, save the date cards, or music for the reception, that I wouldn't have problems to deal with, like a delivery delay or flower mistakes. I thought that not having a color theme or timeline for the reception to worry about would make the wedding easy. The naïvité......

If I had to do it over again, I think I'd just do an intimate wedding with the witnesses and then go to a classy restaurant.

But it was just one day, nothing more, nothing less. Certes, it didn't live up to my expectations, but I hadn't spent a year dreaming of the day only to have it be mediocre. It was nice enough, we got to see people, nothing went wrong, but it's one of those cases where even though each part is okay, the end result isn't great.

And now I'm back to regularly scheduled events: class, tutoring, making dinner, paying bills, cleaning up weird spots of the floor, watering the plants......