Eleven months of long hours and late nights. Pages of notes, dozens of phone calls, hundreds of e-mails. Samples, budgets, spreadsheets, etiquette and opinions. Confession: I didn’t exactly enjoy the wedding planning process (which is surprising, because I am a planner by nature).
There’s pressure in creating a day that honors your attendees and reflects you as a couple, while simultaneously striking a balance with traditions and expectations, not to mention keeping to a budget. I suppose the pressure and stress of it all is exactly why people elope, and there were plenty of times we wondered why we weren’t going that route too.
For us, the purpose of sharing our wedding with friends and family was to honor and celebrate their role in navigating us to that point. We saw our wedding as more than a day about us, and we wanted to connect with the people who shaped us and supported us, who mentored us and loved us. Gathering with friends and family to share in the excitement and being able to see our favorite people more often than usual over those eleven months was arguably the best part of it all.
The weekend of the wedding was a group effort: waffle making, cookie baking, hosting a BBQ, building an arbor, creating signs, recreating favor bags, directing ceremony music, decorating an entire reception, putting up tents and setting up lawn games and bonfires, the list goes on. While friends and family were making it happen, I was falling apart from worry and exhaustion. Up until 24 hours before, I thought I needed to, and could, handle it myself. When the question, “how can I help?” changed to a demand: “tell us what is left on your list and then go do something else”, I felt relieved to have the details taken out of my hands. My pride realized it was okay to need help, and further, that accepting the help did not mean I wasn’t capable or worthy or any multitude of things. It simply meant I was human, I was over my head, and that’s why I have a community in the first place.
In the end, the hardest part of being a bride was not the planning. For me, it was learning how to accept kindness that wasn’t earned. From our parents, from good friends, from neighbors, from extended family; the hardest part was receiving grace. We were the recipients of love and generosity in ways we can’t repay, and rather than feel indebted, I have spent the better part of six weeks replaying the small moments in my mind in awe and gratefulness. We had set out to honor our community, and in the end we were the ones honored by them.
When the wedding day was over, I cried. It was a bittersweet moment. I was sad, because just like that, it was all over; I was overwhelmed by the actions and generosity of friends and family members who pulled together to create the beautiful weekend we had envisioned; I was overjoyed by the events of the day; I was relieved that the long hours and late nights had finally come to an end; I was in awe of the significance of the ceremony and our vows. I felt full, I felt loved, and I felt deeply grateful for the lessons on grace: how to accept it free of charge, how to extend it freely to others, and harder still, to extend it to myself.
Amelia's Musings 