Dreams of wedding plans dance in my head...

From my previous post, you know that my fiancé and I were talking about merging our lives, and making plans for the future together. Yet somehow, we’d managed not to discuss how the event of marriage would take place. Or what we would want our wedding to be like.

The main reason that we had avoided this topic was because we didn’t want to jinx things with our kids. My fiancés son is older, so we knew how he felt about my daughter and I and he was really excited at the thought of us getting married and forming a new family. But he’s 5 years older than my daughter and her moods and opinions are as fast changing as mercury. There were days that she was completely cool with everything, and other days when she would act cooler towards the whole idea.

Then a few months ago, the kids started bugging us pretty hard about when we would get married. And this time, it wasn’t just his son asking, it was my daughter too. Which was VERY cool with us. It relieved a lot of stress and worry from my shoulders, and I’m sure from the shoulders of my fiancé as well. She was really excited about us getting married, and about her having an older brother and they even started asking us if we would have one more kid so that they could have a baby brother/sister. They really got into it and started questioning us about it all the time.

So it was good for me to know that she was ok with things. And once I knew that I had her approval with the plan, it was easy to start thinking about the actual marriage. Not just how we would merge our lives, but when we would take that next step. Which was really neat for me. But still, no discussion regarding weddings.

That all changed at the end of September when we all traveled to Dallas for my friend BH’s wedding. That was the weekend that changed the nature of our discussions. That was the weekend when my future step-son asked why we couldn’t just get married along with our friends since they already had the church and the preacher there! Too funny! To kids, it’s just that easy, right?!?! My fiancé and I were rolling we were laughing so hard.

But sitting through that ceremony, watching my good friend take the vows that I was now free to take, changed something in my head. I sat through that ceremony, looking around at the details and started thinking about what I wanted for my ceremony. And I did the same thing during the reception. I started taking ideas that very night. And my fiancé and I started talking about what we would want at our wedding. We talked all evening about it.

And we talked all the next day about it during our drive home. And the kids got involved. And we all got excited. From that day forward, it’s been nothing but planning our wedding. I mean, we had already worked out all the other logistics during the last few months.

Normally, people have to work out all the details of how to combine their lives AFTER they get engaged. We had been planning this out for months, so the logistics of how to move, when to move, where the extra furniture would go, and how to make the spare bedroom into my daughter’s bedroom where all already planned. Which left things wide open to start planning the wedding…every girl’s dream!

And for me, the wedding took all of my focus. For my fiancé, the engagement took up his time. While I dreamed of wedding dresses, extra special shoes, and fabulous table decorations, he dreamt about the ring and how to pop the question.

The question gets asked…next time!

To move...or not to move

I’ve been having this conversation with several of you for several days now. Who out there still looks for, and maybe needs, their parents’ approval?

I like to think that I’m a big girl, that I’ve moved past that point in my life where I need mom and dad’s nod of approval on things. But I’m afraid that deep down I really haven’t. I want their acceptance of me and mine and what decisions that I make with my life. Is that abnormal? Am I past the age where that should matter?

I’ve been wrestling with trying to figure out whether to move in or not move in with my fiancé. We both have kids, although neither child is with us 100% of the time. My daughter is 6, and she’s with us ½ of the time, and his son who is 10 (almost 11) is with us every other weekend. Luckily, our weekends to have our kids matches and most of the time, we spend the weekend over at my fiance’s house. (I still live in an apartment, and although it is a spacious 2 bedroom, an apartment is still an apartment. And with two rambunctious kiddos, it’s a TINY apartment!) So that being the trend, and for financial purposes to save $ for the wedding, my daughter and I are moving in with my fiancé at the end of my lease. I’m not going to break my lease early or anything, but when it expires, we will move in with him.

And I struggle with this. I think that I’m only struggling with it because I know that at least one parent won’t approve. But I’ve asked myself time and again if I struggle because of that or because I struggle with myself on it. If I am the one with a problem with it, and I’m trying to pass off the blame on my parents.

Do I think that this sets a bad example for my daughter? To be perfectly honest, I don’t know. Or I should say that I didn’t know. I’ve had to do a lot of soul searching to find the answer that lies within me. And here’s what I came up with:

My main concern is that I don’t want her to grow up and think that it’s ok to just move in with a guy. I want her to understand that there needs to be a deeper commitment level before such a step is taken. Do I think that commitment level needs to be marriage? No, honestly I don’t. I always said that if I had had the opportunity to live with my first husband before we were married, that I would never have married him. And I stand by that statement, even after 13 years have passed. Living together would have stopped me from making that mistake, but it wasn’t an acceptable solution for me at the time. But I do want her to understand that a deep commitment needs to be made before she makes a step such as living together.

An engagement is one such step. And to her 6 year-old mind, we are already married. She thinks that we’re having a “ball” where she gets to wear a pretty dress. She doesn’t get that we’re not already married. So with that being said, is there really any harm to it? No, I don’t think that there is.

Some might disagree with me on this. Wait. Let me take that back, some WILL disagree with me on this. And that’s ok. The right to have your own opinion is what makes this place such an awesome place to live. Your opinion doesn’t have to agree with mine, and even if it does bother me that you don’t agree with me, it’ll be ok.

And although it went against what I really wanted to do, all of this was discussed with my ex-husband. (I don’t feel the need to consult with him on many things but as this could have an effect on my daughter, if there was someone to raise a concern then he would be the one that I feel should have a vote in this decision.) And he’s ok with it. He agreed with my points of there needing to be a deeper commitment, and surprisingly he agreed that engagement met that need. Who knew? I was shocked.

So I’m hoping that by sending out this post today, I’ve gotten the last of it off of my chest and I can quit thinking so much about this. I’ve made my decision and hopefully the parental figures will accept it. If not, then it’s only like 10 months until the wedding, and then it’ll be a moot point.

Yeah, I think that I feel better about it already…

High Praise...

I have to admit it….I’m hooked. I LOVE blogging. I wasn’t sure if I would like it or not, but I L-O-V-E it!!! (If I could do cartwheels or something to mark the occasion, I would, but trust me it wouldn’t be a pretty sight to see this lady fall down and hurt herself.)

My fiancé paid me a high compliment last night. He told me that I was a regular Carrie.

Now, for those of you lost somewhere in the Stone Age, that would be Carrie Bradshaw of Sex in the City – the famous journalist with a style all her own and an important column in the paper in NYC. For everyone else in the world who knew immediately what he meant, I’m sure you can understand why I’d be so flattered.

If you can’t understand, then please allow me to try to explain.

You see…I wasn’t really sure about telling him that I was doing a blog. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep something like this a secret from him – Lord knows that everything that I write about has already been discussed with him in detail. So it wasn’t a matter of hiding something from him out of not wanting him to know what I was doing. It was more of an embarrassment factor.

Is that odd to have? I was a little embarrassed to tell him about it in the first place, I didn’t want him reading it right there in front of me, and I thought that he might think that it was silly. And since I didn’t really know (and still don’t) what direction I would take with the blog, I wasn’t sure that he could read everything that I was writing. I mean, if a girl wants to write about her wedding dress, her future husband can’t be reading about it, much less looking at the pictures that said girl might be posting on the blog, right? Right. So when I told him about the blog, I told him that if he ever came upon a post that instructed him not to read it, that I would ask him to respect that and promise not to sneak a peek.

He immediately assured me that he didn’t need to read my blog at all, unless I wanted him to read it. He understood that I might need an avenue to vent and get things off of my chest that deal with my frustrations with him directly, and that he didn’t need to read my blog. Since I sometimes explain things in my head that don’t end up getting said out loud, I immediately started telling him that I wanted him to read my blog. So now, the poor guy is confused. Some crazy lady is sitting in the middle of Wendy’s telling him that she’s blogging now and that she wants him to read it, unless it tells him not to read it. Then we he offers to do the gentlemanly thing and not read it at all so that it’s a private journal so to speak for me, the same crazy lady gets all upset that he won’t read it now. I mean, really. What’s a guy to do?

I, being the crazy lady in Wendy’s, was luckily able to remember that I had failed to mention or fully explain the WHY behind not reading my blog. Once I rectified that, we were on the same page. And being the gentleman that he is, my fiancé totally makes the grand gesture to only read my blog if I instruct him to do so.

So then I had to come clean about the truth of the matter. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to read my blog. I need him to read it. I want him to see this creative expression of myself and still love me anyway. I want to know that it’s ok to be a little neurotic about things, or insecure about myself, and to get that reassurance back from someone whose opinion I value more than any other.

And he came through in spades, didn’t he ladies? Me? Being compared to Carrie? I’m truly honored. (And SO totally blessed to have a guy that even KNOWS who Carrie is, or that she writes an article in the show!)

Back off ladies….he’s taken! Thank you for the high praise, babe. I am the lucky one!

Rearranged Dreams...

Has anyone out there ever started planning your perfect day – your wedding day – only to have something happen to make it totally out of whack? So much so that you just have to go back to the main drawing board and start again?

That happened to me last night. I’ll tell you about it…

My parents seemed to be excited about my new engagement. My fiancé and I live about 4 hours away from my family, so it’s not as if they know him on the level that I know him, but we make the attempt to visit with them and give them that opportunity. So when he asked them for my hand, they all agreed. Some gave advice, and some didn’t – that’s just my parents. (They have been divorced since I was a small child, and have both remarried – he had two sets of parents to talk with.)

But when we got engaged, it was more a formality in my mind. To me, we’d been talking about the wedding that we wanted and how we wanted to do things for the last three months. I hadn’t really talked too much with my family about these things so that he would have the opportunity to ask for my hand without them knowing that we’d already been talking about it. So, pretty much, I need to give them time to catch up.

But the whole time in the last two or three months that we’ve been looking for venues and vendors and deciding what we wanted to have for our wedding, I’ve had this image in the back of my head on how this all would go down. My family would be excited for me, and my mom and step-mom would get involved in the planning aspect of things. At least to go dress shopping with me and maybe be there to help me pick out colors and flowers and that type of thing.

So imagine my surprise when I get a tepid response from my mom when I asked her about having friends to invite to the wedding. She said no. And she didn’t just say no, she said NO. I was taken aback and kinda confused, but I didn’t say anything other than ok. I got off the phone with her and went about my business. But it bugged me. It sat in the back of my head and bugged me all night long. And for most of the next day.

So by the time that my fiancé came and got me for dinner, I had worked myself up all kinds of ways. I laid it out on the table with him to get his opinion. (He’s absolutely my best friend in the world and I trust what he says and value his opinion.) He encouraged me to call my mom and talk things over.

When I worked up the courage to do that, sometimes a girl needs a little pep talk first, I called and talked to her about us picking a date for the wedding (still not decided on that one) and her opinion of it. She started asking some questions and even wanted the website of the venue that we were looking at doing the shin-dig at and I had pretty much convinced myself that I was wrong. That I had just caught her on an off night or just totally misread things. But me being anal me, I had to ask the question to be sure. (Are there ever times you wish that you’d just shut up?)

Her answer was that even though she was happy for me and excited for me, she was old fashioned in her beliefs and let’s be honest here, this was my third wedding. One just doesn’t do a big wedding for the third one. She didn’t have any friends that she wanted to come to it, since it was my third. She went on to say that most of her friends now didn’t know me and she didn’t think that they would want to travel the 4 hours to see someone that they didn’t know get married. She was nice about it all, but pretty much she told me that she thought that it was tacky that I was having a big wedding on my third marriage. It’s just not done.

And my dreams were crushed. The vision in my mind of us dress shopping and asking her opinion on this color vs. that color or helping with the centerpieces just swirled around and around and around the delete tank in my mind until they disappeared. They are gone and that never will be. As I sat back and thought about it, I cried. And not just little tears, but great big wrenching sobs. My mom’s approval means a lot to me, and she pretty much told me that I didn’t have it.

It’s disappointing, but nothing that I can’t work around. Despite how she might feel on the subject, my fiancé and I BOTH want a big wedding. Neither one of us had happy last marriages, including the actual wedding ceremony, and we want that. We truly want to have our friends and family around to support us and cheer us on as we make this step in our lives. We’re not old, we’re both in our very early 30’s, so this is a big step for us. Since we both have been married before, we’re not asking anyone other than ourselves to pay for this, so if this is what we want then it’s what we want. And I’m happy with my decision to press on. And feel truly blessed that when faced with this crying girl that wasn’t even making sense while she tried to explain what just happened, my fiancé scooped me up and sat me in his lap so that I could be held while I cried. When the tears stopped and I was able to explain without the sobs, he hugged me and said that it would be ok. That he would be right by my side and help me do the flowers….he’s a gem of a guy!

But the little girl inside of me is still sad to lose the person that I wanted most by my side during this process….

Has anyone out there had to re-arrange or cope with a new theory on how to do something like this without that one person that you wanted to be involved in it with you?