New Year, New Beginnings

Here’s hoping 2006 brings us a little closer to all that we hope for in life.

Happy New Year

Wedding Day

Warning: very loooonng post

Like any other little girl, I had many fantasies about what my wedding day would be like when I grew up. What happened December 10 was nothing close to any of those childhood dreams. What happened December 10 was truly an outpouring of love and joy.

Flights of relatives and friends from the Midwest and East Coast were delayed or outright cancelled due to bad weather and that little incident of the plane skidding off the runway in Chicago. Yet, people stuck it out through the delays or wrangled with the airlines to change flights and made it to Southern California. By the day of the wedding, the tent where our ceremony was going to take place had not gone up yet. And our patio where tables were to be set up for the reception had not been swept or cleaned out. Not to mention there was still more cooking to do and most of the rooms of our house was still not ready to be a place to spend any enjoyable time in. We woke up that morning knowing we would be married that night, no matter what, but feared the ceremony would take place among piles of unused decorations and tangled Christmas lights. Eight of our friends and family volunteered to come over that morning for last minute preparations. Little did they know what they had gotten themselves into.

By the time I left for my hair appointment at 9:30AM, only my brother and his wife had arrived to help. I had just moved to this neighborhood and called up the closest stylist a few weeks before to make the appointment. I had read all the advice about testing out a stylist before the big day, but with our timetable, that was just not feasible. I just tried to keep the faith and focused on the fact that we were doing this solely as part of the process of starting a family. Whether I was the most beautiful or ugliest bride in the world did not matter. What would matter is that by the end of the day we would be married and one step closer to having a family.

I got to the salon right on time. I saw my stylist, an older woman, doing the hair of another older lady. She turned around to say good morning and I saw her unstyled hair, pushed back by a head band. Thick eyeliner outlined both her eyes. I have to admit, I got a little scared at this point. When you go to a hair stylist, you kind of want to have some confidence in the work that they do. The way she looked did not engender any kind of confidence. But what could I do? I had no hair styling ability myself and as I settled down in a chair to wait for her to finish, I took a deep breath and told myself that no matter what happens with my hair, it didn’t matter. The outcome of my hairdo was not going to affect the outcome of the day. I decided I would tell her in very general terms what I wanted (hair up, out of the way and in place for the whole day) and let her do her best. She was a very friendly woman but after about 45 minutes (!) and what I thought was an 80% completed updo, she decided to unravel the whole thing and start all over! Part of me wanted to scream NO! The other part just wondered silently what else I could do except wait it out. It was too late to find someone else so I took another deep breath and reminded myself again that no matter what I would be married by the end of the day. About 20 minutes into her next attempt, the phone rang. She went to go pick it up and ended up having a 10 minute conversation with a tenant of hers about complaints from another tenant of hers. After the phone call, she decided she could not have any more distractions and needed to focus on what she was doing. Her solution? To leave her phone off the hook! So, now the phone makes that annoying and loud signal to alert you that the phone is off the hook. After several minutes of this, the phone finally falls silent and by about 11AM, she was done. As suspected, it was not the best updo but not the worst. And it was quite suitable…for a housewife…in the 1940’s. But, what was done was done. I headed home and just tried to make the best of it. It was turning out to be a beautiful day. The sun was shining and there were a few clouds in the sky (just enough to make it pretty) and I swear, the temperature must have been about 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius). By the time I got home, almost everyone who said they would come over to help had arrived. The patio was being cleared and the tent frame put together. There was a fun energy reverberating throughout. Everyone commented on my hair (positive but outright lies! But, very sweet and appreciated). About 20 minutes later, the tent was lifted up. Remember that scene in Witness where Harrison Ford participated in an Amish barn raising and the frames of the barn are pulled up and the music swells, then everyone sits down, happily eating lunch, talking and laughing (ok, so only the men sit down and eat happily and the women stay standing and serving the food, but imagine that with both men and women enjoying themselves)? That was exactly what it felt like when I saw the tent go up. People from different parts of our lives, family and friends, helping us build something beautiful and promising.

By lunchtime, the general look of the ceremony tent and patio was taking shape and we felt relieved that with the good weather (and rented console heater as backup) and tables and chairs available in the patio we were at least ready to handle everybody who would be showing up in a few hours, even if none of the rooms in our house was presentable. Everyone by this time would just pitch in and do anything and everything that needed to be done. No questioning, egos or bad feelings. Just a lot of joking around and running around getting things done. Several people even picked up the clothes they were going to wear to bring them back to our house so they could stay with us through the end and then just change into them right before the party. Table decorations were made up, candles put out and a million other little touches we didn’t even know about until days later when we started to put things away. About an hour before guests were going to arrive, I started to make the last of the food. The potato omelet. It was to be my downfall. The first omelet was burnt, the second spilled all over the stove and the third all over the sink. At this point, I decided I was too stressed out to cook and knew if I attempted anymore, I would just end up wasting all the eggs. We dropped many of the side dishes we were going to buy because we didn’t have anytime to run out and buy them, so it was kind of critical we had this dish. Mr. Warrior said he would try once he got a few more things done and in the meantime, my brother made an attempt, but it was just as disastrous. Pretty soon, people started to arrive and we realized, we had not yet changed into our wedding clothes yet. Half an hour later, still not changed. An hour later? Yep, still in our work clothes. Finally, we got our clothes and headed toward our master bath (quite a feat considering there were people now in every room of our house as well as the patio) and locked the door. We looked at each other, took a deep breath and realized…we had not yet cleaned our bathroom. There was no way we could only open up our one guest bathroom when there were 80 people milling around, so we proceeded to (silently) clean the floors, toilet, etc. We took turns going out and discretely grabbing cleaning supplies so to keep the bathroom occupied while it was still being cleaned. Intermittently, people would knock on our bathroom door and we would have to shout, “we’re still getting dressed!” As we finally started to get dressed (for real), we noticed how much more frequent the knocking became. Someone finally shouted through the door that the other bathroom had backed up and has been unusable. And could we maybe let one of my cousins in since it was an emergency? We were stunned!! We were really halfway through getting dressed at this point, so we quickly threw on the rest of our clothes and Mr. Worrier, in his suit, grabbed the plunger and headed to the other bathroom. (Now I wish I had a picture of that, but at the time it was a horrifying thought. What if the contents of the toilet backed out violently and onto Mr. Worrier and onto his suit?!?) Luckily, Mr. Warrior cleared up the situation (ahem) and all the bathrooms were now suitable for use. We decided to give people a few minutes to use the facilities and prepared to start the ceremony.

I knew one thing my father really wanted was to walk me down the aisle. Many, many years ago when I was about 11 or 12, my family and I were walking from the parking lot to the mall. He held my hand as we crossed over to the mall and said to me that this would probably be one of the last few times he would every hold my hand again since I was growing up. And that the next time would probably not be until I was getting married and he walked me down the aisle. So, even though we were planning a very low key and informal ceremony, I wanted to make sure that he could hold my hand one more time. I started to look for my father to start the ceremony and he was no where in sight. After several inquiries it turns out that the battery of my father’s video camera which one of my relatives was operating had died. And my father had gone back to the hotel to pick up his extra battery. Now, the second most important thing to my father for the wedding besides walking me down the aisle, would probably be to have pictures and video of the wedding. My dad has always been a picture and video freak when it comes to any occasion so it was no surprise he was so intent on getting a battery for his video camera (even though my brother also had his). We waited and waited for my father to get back. We checked to make sure he was the only person missing (he was) and waited some more. Crazy thoughts went through my head while we were waiting (what if he got into a horrible accident on the way back and was killed?) but he finally got back. We ushered everyone out to the patio and tent. Asked everyone aged 55+ and their companions to take a seat (we didn’t have enough room for everyone to sit down), then lowered the age limit to 50+ when some people didn’t want to own up to their ages and half the 25 or so seats we had available (remember we had 80 people) were still not taken. Then, added people with children. My brother started the music (Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole) and my father and I walked down the aisle. Our friend who was marrying us said some words and Mr. Warrior said a few sentences (can’t remember exactly what, was too busy trying to figure what I was going to say), then I said a few sentences about how I was happy to see all the different people in our lives being with us. Then we took turns reading the selection “On Marriage” from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Our friend asked us if we would take each other as husband and wife. We exchanged rings (Mr. Warrior placed mine on the wrong hand! I tried to discretely tell him to put it on the other hand, but he didn’t hear me. Oh well. I switched it after we walked into the house after the ceremony.)

Now, the dinner craziness starts. We planned to start people on the soups and salad while we finished the preparations for dinner. We didn’t have time to pick up the Thai soup, so we just had the one cream of corn and roasted pepper soup and our salad bar. We also had appetizers we started serving when guests were still arriving and those were still out, but people kept coming into the dining room where we had a buffet set up to “take a peek” at what we were going to have for dinner. People also started grabbing dinner plates to use those for salads when they came in to “peek” which became annoying and created a large traffic jam, because other people saw this and thought dinner was ready. There were other people who came in and actually provided help. Like a friend of ours who is an avid cook who jumped in to make those annoying omelets. And several times, as I would try to put out food, someone or another would see what I was doing and just take over and finish up, without me asking for help. And as the dining room became more crowded, my brother and another cousin of mine (male and very tall) started acting as buffet bouncers, stopping people from coming in and closing as many doors as possible to cut off the area. It was ingenious! Especially on the part of my cousin who probably figured that helping out in this way would also ensure he would be one of the first in line when dinner was ready!

After about another half hour or maybe 45 minutes (it was hard to tell and I didn’t really care how long it was taking as long as things were getting done), we were finally ready to open up the buffet area. When we had first moved into the house, I had noticed a good size bell that hung outside next to the patio. I had rung it once before to see if it worked and to see what it sounded like and new it had a nice, solid ring to it. As we got ready to announce that dinner was served, I yelled excitedly to Mr. Warrior that I was going to ring the bell. He got my brother posted at one glass door that opened to the patio and my bouncer cousin posted at the sliding door that opened to the living room. I went to stand next to the bell and Mr. Warrior signaled a countdown with one hand. At “zero,” I rang the bell once…the doors flew open and our guests were surprised (stunned?) into silence. I rang the bell twice, then three, four and five times. Mr. Warrior announced that dinner was ready and everyone applauded and half our guests jumped into line.

After everyone had a chance to eat dinner, we started our White Elephant gift exchange. Some of the older folk and others who didn’t bring a gift to participate left at this point. We had about 45 or so participants and so it went on for about two and half hours. By the end of the night, I was very tired but quite happy how things had turned out even though there were many things we didn’t get to do and many little crises that turned up along the way. It was not how I ever imagined my wedding to be, but it was wonderful, heartwarming and full of family and friends we really care about. Mr. Warrior’s cousin, his date and her two daughters stayed after (without being asked!) to help us put away the leftover food. We went to bed about 2AM…happily married.

T Minus 2 Days and Counting

The cooking frenzy begins! Our planned menu for our buffet dinner was:

-Salad Bar (spinach and/or lettuce plus lots of chopped tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, celery, corn, red onions, carrots etc.)

-Soup “Bar” (two soups—Creamy Corn with roasted red pepper and a Tom-Yum Thai soup ordered from a local restaurant, and it really is yummy-yum-yum)

-Carrots with Coriander*

-Rosemary Potatoes (bought at Costco)

-Steamed then chilled broccoli with a yogurt-ginger dressing*

-Quinoa pilaf

-Tabouleh*

-Whole Roasted Pig (20 lbs; ordered form a Chinese BBQ restaurant)

-4 Roast Ducks (3 cut up, 1 kept whole for presentation; ordered with pig)

-Whole poached (then chilled) salmon

-Chicken with yogurt*

-Spanish Potato Omelets*

-Steamed Asparagus (served chilled)

-Octopus Salad (from a local Italian deli)

-Various and sundry items from Whole Foods deli as additional side dishes that Mr. Warrior would pick up

(*these recipes are from cookbooks written by Marian Burros which are no longer in print. But, if you are ever looking for good, simple, relatively quick and absolutely tasty recipes, she is definitely the way to go!)

So, we had to cook about 2/3’s of the foods we planned to serve and a good friend of mine was coming to spend two days with me to help me cook all of it. We had planned to start early Thursday morning, but I ended up having to go to Costco that morning to pick up 4 dozen red roses I was going to use for making my bouquet and corsages/boutonnieres and my friend ended up not arriving until after lunch. We started off with the easy stuff and steamed all the veggies that needed steaming, then stored them in the refrigerator to chill. That took only about an hour and a half. We were quite proud of ourselves and started cooking the carrots for the carrots and coriander dish. When that was done, we started on the tabouleh. That went great until we realized that the corn oil had gone rancid! Of course, we didn’t realize this until we had already added it to the 6 cups of soaked bulgur. Luckily, the oil was poured more or less in the middle of the bulgur and we were able to dig out all the affected kernels, so we didn’t have to completely start over. By the time we finished the tabouleh it was near 11pm and I still had to make my bouquet. I knew it would never get done if I put it off until the day before the wedding, so we broke out my trusty how-to book and sat down to make it. It turned out pretty wonderful and I was very proud of the fact that it only took about $10 worth of roses to do it. I had gotten a quote from a wholesale florist and was quoted $250 for a duchess rose bouquet! Here is a picture of it taken the day after the wedding:

It was a lot of fun just talking and hanging out with my friend while we made the bouquet, but I was quite tired by the time I got to bed by 1AM. Lots more food needed to be cooked and more people would be arriving the next day. I was already more than exhausted. I wasn’t sure at this point how I was going to be awake enough to make it through the wedding ceremony that was supposed to take place in about 40 or so hours. And did I mention that we hadn’t figured out what exactly was going to happen at our ceremony and had no ideas what our vows were going to be? We were having a civil ceremony using a friend of ours who got “appointed” (i.e. fill out a form and pay $50 to the state of California) to be a Deputy Marriage Commissioner, who would then have the legal power to marry us. The paperwork we got stipulated that the only things that needed to happen during the ceremony was that we each had to say we would take the other as husband or wife and the Deputy Marriage Commissioner had to announce he had the power to marry us and proclaim us husband and wife. Although we wanted a simple ceremony, a three sentence ceremony just wasn’t going to cut it. But, we had no idea (or the time to think of ideas) of what else we wanted to have in the ceremony.

So, let’s recap. With 40 hours left to go, we still had half the food to cook, the tent for the ceremony to put up, the patio where we would have tables for dinner to clean up because it was a mess and filled with Christmas and other decorations, still in their original packaging. We had the clever idea of turning one of our bedrooms into a kid’s room, but it was still filled with 78 pots of poinsettias. These poinsettias were going to double as wedding decoration and wedding favors. Another clever idea, but they were taking up way too much space at this point and getting in the way of all the last minute preparations. Basically, we had a house and backyard/patio full of clutter with too little food to feed the 80 people that were going to start descending upon us.

Any bets as to how much we actually got done before the ceremony?

T Minus 4 Days and Counting: If there’s family drama, it must be a real wedding we’re having…

My parents took a very long time to accept Mr. Warrior. In fact, it took about a decade. When we first started dating in 1992, I was 19 and he was 44. Add in the fact that he was not Chinese and I knew my parents would go ballistic. So, the first 6 months or so of dating, I didn’t tell them. It was not hard to do because my relationship with my parents wasn’t a very communicative one. But, one day I just decided I didn’t want to live that way anymore. It wasn’t about wanting to be closer to my parents, it was wanting them to accept me for who I was no matter how much they disapproved. And, I was tired of keeping things from them just because I was afraid of upsetting them. I was tired of doing things the traditional way, where the negative and the unpleasant is not talked about in an attempt to make them nonexistent. When I called my mother up to tell her about Mr. Warrior, she was calm at first, asking me all sorts of questions, trying to gage the situation. I answered everything honestly and we got off the phone. Then I waited. Because I knew I wouldn’t get my parents real reaction until after she had processed it all and talked to my father. Sure enough, she called back several hours later and it all exploded. There was yelling and crying, yelling and pleading, yelling and lecturing and then just plain yelling. It was exhausting, but all along I knew it was the right thing to do. A week later, they asked me to come home to “talk” to me. I think they wanted to get me back into their territory because they believed Mr. Warrior was brainwashing me. (Years later I would learn that they were afraid he was part of some syndicate where the men tried to seduce young, Asian college women to con their families out of money.) When I went home, they wanted me to drop out of college, come home and figure things out with them about what I how I was to handle my relationship with Mr. Warrior. Well, I KNEW how I was going to handle my relationship with Mr. Warrior, it was my relationship with my parents I didn’t know how to handle. Of course I refused. I made plans to have Mr. Warrior come get me out of their house if they weren’t going to drive me back to my apartment 2 hours away, but for some reason at the end of the weekend they did. Then followed weeks of various family members calling me and telling me how much my parents were hurting and to break off my relationship with Mr. Warrior because it was causing my parents so much pain. No calls from my parents, but plenty from all my relatives. During this time, they also asked Mr. Warrior to speak with the matriarchs of the family at one point (very strange, since it was always the males in my family who made the big decisions when I was growing up). This included my grandmother who spoke no English, my father’s sisters and my mother. Mr. Warrior (who was very patient through all of this and supported me the whole time) went. It was a lot of questions about his intentions and he answered honestly. That he didn’t know where this was going or if it meant we were going to be married eventually, but he cared for me very much at this point and had no intention of doing me or my family any harm. That was not what my family wanted to hear and I think they came away from it very dissatisfied. After a month or two, I guess my parents just go to the end of their rope. My mom called me up, crying and gave me the ultimatum. Them or Mr. Warrior. I couldn’t have a relationship with both. I told her, yes, I could have relationship with both, but if they chose not to have a relationship with me because of Mr. Warrior, then that was their decision, not mine. My father came up the next day and told me I had to withdraw the money they have given me to put into a bank account for my college tuition. He told me it wasn’t just because I chose Mr. Warrior over them, but because they were having financial troubles and needed the money. (I think he said that second part to “throw off” Mr. Warrior because they were still afraid he was after their money. Also my parents figured if I didn’t have any money for college, I would eventually have to return home). I told him, I’m sorry he’s having financial troubles but I needed money to continue school and to live in general. That I know the money was their hard earned money and I would find a job to support myself and eventually give them their money back. I just couldn’t give it all back right now. We drove to my bank, I withdrew half the money I had in my account and gave it to him. And that’s how I came to be disowned by my parents.

Eventually, I got a job and Mr. Warrior lent me $2000 so that I could get through my last two years of college and graduate. After some time, my parents started speaking to me again. First my mom, then eventually my dad. (My mom would make surreptitious phone calls, telling me she wasn’t supposed to be talking to me but that she just needed to know if I was ok. I would tell her I was ok, she would cry then say bye and hang up.) For years, though, we did not ever talk about Mr. Warrior. They kept to their “if we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist” philosophy and I went along with it. I spent Thanksgiving with Mr. Warrior’s family and saw my parents for Chinese New Year’s. My family always celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve, so I would go by myself to see my parents a few days before Christmas, then drive home Christmas morning to spend Christmas day with Mr. Warrior and his mom. Then, in the summer of 2003 my parents decided to visit us. By this time we had moved to Southern California and they flew in for a day and a night. It was the first time they spent any time with Mr. Warrior in the 11 years we had been together except for my mom when she saw him at the matriarch meeting. My brother and his girlfriend, now wife, came to visit also. We were a bit apprehensive at first, but it turned out well. Since then my parents and I have developed a better relationship and a more communicative one. I finally felt I could be completely me with them and be accepted by them. They still had their issues, but I could see them trying to respect my choices and keep their opinions to themselves. Mr. Warrior was finally invited to Chinese New Year’s in early 2004 and officially accepted into the family. A few months later when I found out I was pregnant, I had expected my parents pressure us into getting married. Instead, my mom told us to do what we thought was best but she knows how tiring it can be to be pregnant and advised us to wait until the baby was older to get married. She was sincere and I believed she felt like Mr. Warrior was my de facto husband and trusted him to take care of me and our baby, no matter what legal status we had. My parents were both devastated when I told them about the miscarriage. Apparently, they had already started thinking about Chinese nicknames they wanted to call the baby (my mom kept suggesting names for a boy and my dad objected since he was convinced it was going to be a girl). At my brother’s wedding this last summer, in the four days we were there, my father spent more time with Mr. Warrior than I did. Because he kept insisting on taking Mr. Warrior along wherever he went. By the time we had set a date for the wedding, they were probably more in love with Mr. Warrior than I was.

Which was why it was such a shock to be finding ourselves angry at my parents four days before our wedding. We had planned a Saturday morning breakfast at a nice restaurant for Mr. Warrior’s parents, my parents and our siblings. In fact, we had a private dining room all to ourselves. We planned for just the immediate family because our parents had never met before and even though we knew we would be crazy-busy with last minute preparations, we thought it would just be plain uncomfortable for them, and inconsiderate on our part, if the first time they met was at our wedding with 75 other people around. And since more than half of those people would be my relatives, we thought it would help Mr. Warrior’s parents feel less overwhelmed by my family. We couldn’t do it any earlier, because my parents weren’t arriving until 10:30pm the night before the wedding, so the morning of the wedding was when it was going to have to be. I put together a slideshow of pictures of us and our families for the wedding, and Mr. Warrior suggested we show it to our parents at the breakfast to take the pressure off of the first meeting. When I first told my mom about the breakfast, her first response was that we had to invite her brother who they were flying in with. I explained to her that this was going to be a quick breakfast and the point was for them to meet Mr. Warrior’s parents and having other people there would just be a distraction. She told me it wouldn’t look good if my uncle knew about it and wasn’t invited. I told her he wouldn’t be upset if he didn’t know about. Two days later, four days before the wedding, my father calls back. He says they have to bring another uncle, his brother-in-law, because he was going to be in town by then and my parents promised his wife, my dad’s sister, they would make sure my diabetic uncle ate properly and timely. I told him I’m sure my uncle could take care of himself being that he has had diabetes for years and if he couldn’t, surely his daughter, daughter-in-law and grandson, who were in town for the wedding, could take him to breakfast that morning. My dad then told me how my uncle does not wish to see any members of his own family at this wedding but I was not to tell my cousins about it. Now, how my uncle was going to avoid seeing his daughter, daughter-in-law and grandson when he came to our wedding which was going to be held in our 3 bedroom, 1700 square feet house, I’ll never know. But this is when I started getting really upset because twice now they have tried to get an uncle of mine to come to this breakfast, even though I made it very clear it was just for the parents so that they could meet each other and so that Mr. Warrior’s parents would not feel overwhelmed by the tidal wave of Chinese people they were going to encounter later that night. Plus, I suspected something else was going on because all the explanations about why one or the other of my uncles had to be there was a bit ludicrous. And from the way they were acting, I knew I was not going to get the real reason out of them. I felt that they were placed in the middle of something, but I couldn’t figure out if it was cultural traditions that were blocking them in (i.e. we need a male elder to be present at the meeting of the parents) or family pressure (i.e. my father’s sister insisting on her husband being looked after at my wedding) or their own discomfort at meeting Mr. Warrior’s parents. And the way my parents were dealing with this whole situation was a little too reminiscent of all the weirdness that resulted when they first found out about Mr. Warrior. I felt like all the progress we made as a family was for naught and we had regressed to the relationship we had a decade ago. We were back to the old way of dealing with things and I didn’t like it. I felt they should have trusted me and Mr. Warrior. That we would have made the meeting with his parents as un-awkward as possible for everyone even if the situation was less than ideal. I was frustrated at their need to hide behind tradition or excuses in an attempt to alleviate their own anxieties. I decided to play their game and told them I wasn’t sure we could have my uncle there because we already made the reservations and I didn’t know if the room we had could handle more people. Two hours later, my brother calls. My dad had called him asking for either him or my sister-in-law to back out of the breakfast to make a space for my uncle! At this point, I dug my heels in. I explained to my brother why I wanted both of them there and not my uncle (of course my brother understood) and told him that I would handle my parents. I called my parents back the next morning and asked them, straight up, why they were so insistent on my uncle being there. Was it tradition? Family pressure? What? They kept to their story about him needing to be looked after and how he did not want to see his own family. This made me even more furious. Because, if true, I was being asked to endure a breakfast with someone who is almost always belligerent and difficult to deal with on a day when the focus is supposed to be on me and Mr. Warrior, not on an uncle I never see. Why I was expected to deal with my uncle’s issues with his family when he chose to come to a wedding knowing his family members were also going to be there, I’ll never know. When I hung up the phone, I wanted to throw it across the room and yell and scream. Then I wanted to cry. And I did. I cried and yelled and screamed and told Mr. Warrior I wanted to cancel the breakfast. He agreed. He was as pissed off as I was and at this point wanted to have nothing to do with my family. I called my mom back, told her we had way too many things to do and we were canceling the breakfast. She responded with relief, saying it was probably the best solution.

I still don’t understand why and what happened. On the morning of the wedding, Mr. Warrior received a call from my cousin, the daughter of the uncle who was so insistent on not seeing his family. She called to say that she would be late in coming over to help us out (which was ok with us since she spent the whole day before helping out and we had a phalanx of people already at the house). The reason? She was going to have brunch with my parents, her sister-in-law, her nephew and HER FATHER.

As far as I can tell, they had a perfectly pleasant brunch and both my cousin and her sister-in-law had a good time seeing my uncle whom they hadn’t seen in quite awhile. As for me and Mr. Warrior? Well, we decided the traditional ways are not so bad after all. We plan to never talk about this incident again with my parents.

T Minus 5 Days and Counting

Since college, I’ve always been a list girl. Sometimes I write my lists down, sometimes the lists only exist in my head. Most of the time I make the list because I am stressed out and sitting down and writing out a list of things to be done soothes that anxiety by giving me a sense of control. Then the feeling when I cross things off the list once their done...priceless!

Of course, throughout all the wedding preparations I have made endless lists. The last list I made before the wedding was something like this:

-order whole roast pig

-shop for groceries

-prepare/cook food for wedding

-clean bathrooms

-finish setting up patio (tables, seating, candles, etc.)

-make reservations for dinner Friday night (for people arriving early for the wedding)

-make reservations for breakfast Saturday morning (so parents can meet for the first time!!)

-make reservations for Sunday brunch (for people who have not left yet)

Not too bad, right? Except, if you look closely, you will see that a few of the items like “shop for groceries” or “prepare food for wedding” is quite involved and probably required sublists in and of themselves. But, I was still in my “oh everything will turn out ok, because really, what has gone wrong?” state of mind, completely blocking out the fact that in the last 18 months I had lost a baby, haven’t been able to get pregnant again and found out I will probably never be able to have my own biological children. But, hey, it was my wedding and every woman has delusions about how perfect her wedding is going to be, right? And, honestly, as I think about it now, I think I was almost purposely testing Life. I could no longer have delusions that I could have anxiety-free sex, get oops! pregnant, stroll through 9 months in a state of bliss and have a baby in my arms. But that wasn’t going to stop me from having delusions of a dream wedding. How was I going to cook for 80 people and still feed them on time, after the ceremony? It was just going to happen. How are we going to set up the house in time, when there were still a million boxes of random things lying around in every room and the carpet still needed to be vacuumed, the bathrooms cleaned, the tables to be set up and a thousand other things done? It was just going to happen. This wedding was as much about believing again that good things can happen in my life as it was about becoming legally husband and wife. We didn’t know how things would get done, but I had my list and we had a group of people we knew would be showing up to help in the last few days. And.It.Was.Just.Going.To.Happen. Whatever gets done, will be it. We may not end up having every last detail we hoped for (I may have had my delusions, but I was also realistic), but whatever we ended up with was going to be good. Wonderful, even. So what if I had never poached a whole salmon in my life and didn’t have the proper pans to do it? It was going to happen and I was determined to believe in it to the end.

Whole Roast Pig? Ordered, paid for in advance and pickup time determined.

Shop for Groceries? My cousin (same cousin we are considering to be our donor) and good friend who came to help me cook kept me sane by driving me to the grocery store when I could no longer think complete thoughts let alone drive. One read the grocery list while I directed them to the right location in the store and the other managed the shopping cart. They kept me going and on track and helped me get the shopping and cooking done.

Poaching that salmon? A friend's husband, who is a chef, lent me a gigantic pan and a wonderful recipe.

Clean the bathrooms? Well, kind of. Good enough anyway and there is a (now) funny story that I will write about in the wedding day post.

Reservations for various meals? All cancelled! Why you ask? Long story (again will be told in an upcoming post). But, in the end it was all mostly for the best.

I learned many things during the last few days leading up to the wedding. But, most importantly I learned that it is good for me to make my lists, to lean on other people if I need to in order to make the things on those lists happen and then I need to let the list go.

Because I can still end up happy even if there are things on that list that never get crossed off.

T Minus 7 Days and Counting

One week before our wedding day, we woke up to find that it was freezing cold. Now, we have lived in southern California for the last five years and what happens when you have lived in southern California for that long is that you forget there are days when the temperature can go below 55 degrees Fahrenheit (about 13 degrees Celsius). Pretty much anything below that feels “freezing cold” after you have lived in a place where the average temperature is about 65 degrees. Year-Round. (You also start doing things like get cranky when the sun stops shining for two days in a row, but that’s another story.) Normally, when the temperature drops in December, we take it as a nice reminder that winter has arrived. But, when you have planned for 80 guests to be standing outside at 6pm for your wedding ceremony, then sit outside a (covered) patio for dinner, when the temperature drops like that, you start freaking out a little bit. It was probably foolish to believe we could pull off an outdoor wedding in December, even if it’s in southern California, but foolish we were and now with only 7 days to go and weather.com predicting a 20% of showers, we were starting to fear a disaster on our hands.

The next morning we woke up and it felt as if icicles were hanging off our noses. As we laid in bed, dreading the cold, thinking about our failed test run to warm the patio even though we had put up plastic sheeting all around the sides and used 3 gas heaters, we pretty much just freaked out completely. We counted and recounted the seats we had around the house and realized that even with creative seating (i.e. counting both toilet seats), we would be able to have no more than half of the people stay comfortably indoors. The Sunday before the wedding became a mad scramble to figure out what we could possibly do to pump heat into the patio.

As we laid in bed, afraid to move for fear of the cold and of the pending disaster, we told ourselves that no matter what, we would be married on December 10. If need be we would do it in our kitchen, with a 6pm ceremony and a repeat 6:30pm showing for those who couldn’t get close enough to view it the first time. We hoped we wouldn’t have to resort to that, but the most important thing was to get married so that we can start a family. It would be nice if we had a nice wedding and all our guests could enjoy it, but you know what? If we can survive a hellish miscarriage and a year and counting of infertility, our family and friends could probably survive a few hours of discomfort.

After this realization, we were able to unlock ourselves out of our fears, call up party places to find the only one that still had console heaters to rent to heat up the patio, buy a tent under which to hold our ceremony and get ready for the last crazy days of wedding preparations. We were quite pleased with ourselves to have worked through the weather crises. I even allowed myself the thought that perhaps everything would be smooth sailing after this point.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Calling Western Union

Wedding over STOP Almost recovered STOP Many posts in head STOP Will be back in the blogosphere soon STOP