When I think back on the nine months I spent planning my wedding, I remember making a series of odd choices. I took my veil off after the ceremony to put on a flower crown, even though I’ve never been to a single music festival, don’t own cowboy boots, and never had a boho chic phase. I invited people who I don’t know anymore; who I’m not even sure I really knew then. The strapless dress I chose to walk down the aisle in was not weather or seasonally appropriate. (It was October in Indianapolis.)
But more memorable than any of that were the fights I had with my mom. Somehow, talking about my wedding with her had an unbelievable ability to turn me into the worst version of myself: 15 years old, hormonal, unhinged, and a little bit of a bitch. One perfectly reasonable question about location details, menu, or floral arrangements sent me right back to the worst phase of my adolescence—the one where I was almost always about to slam my bedroom door with such intensity it shook the house, my heart adrenalized with an irrational hatred.
To be fair, my mother’s shadow self also emerged while wedding planning, and it was more than a fragile young bride could handle. One day, my calligrapher called me at the office, to ask where to send the 30 extra emergency wedding invitations. “Sorry to bother you at work,” he said. “But where do you want these thirty new invites sent?” He trailed off, waiting for me to speak. I’d been momentarily perplexed—spinning my office phone cord around my manicured finger—I painted my nails ballet slipper pink with neurotic regularity for about a year after my husband proposed, a habit I had uncritically embraced but would soon abandon—my brain slow to catch on to what was really happening. Then it hit me, like a catering truck gone out of control down an icy hill, slamming into a reception tent: my mother had ordered them.
I gritted my teeth, imagining 30 unapproved guests—strangers she’d met at a neighbor’s Christmas party, or someone in her book club, and their plus-ones—at the intimate ceremony I’d been imagining since…well, not since I was a kid (I wasn’t that brainwashed by Disney), but definitely since other people I knew had weddings that seemed fabulous and I’d started wanting a party for myself. As I saw it then, the gall she had, the lack of boundaries, the lapse in communication. It made my blood boil up into my brain and turned me into a sobbing, ridiculous teenager.
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