I teared up near the end of that. It was sweet.

I really, really, didn't expect it, but I was pretty sad that more of my grad-school compatriots didn't make my wedding.

I wish that events could have permitted them to be there.

Still, various familial-units made it and I'm glad they did--for their sakes.

Selfishly, I don't care that much. Though I suppose I know better, I still think it was for the Wife and me, not everyone else.

It was decently written, for a change. Or at least it was written with some measure of metaphorical restraint.

That was a sweet piece. I can say that weddings can mean a lot to the mother-son relationship in that situation, too.

They can do wonders with Photoshop these days.

5 is hilarious. Tim you bastard, you.

"They can do wonders with Photoshop these days."

2: What surprised me was how little it mattered who turned up here.

What mattered was who was buried there, and why.

Becks, ditto. I've almost lost mine a couple times, and this had me very misty eyed.

I can't imagine having planned a wedding without my mother. (She drove me nuts, but it was fun.)

IME, wedding are mostly about the families of the couple. My sense is that is even more true of the marriage.

Well, that was depressing. Now I know what I'll have to look forward to when I get married! Damn wedding-industrial complex.

IME, wedding are mostly about the families of the couple.

For real, baby. The public face of your private life. I hate when people want to get all creative and shit, and make it all about their own unique fabulosity. Fuck that shit, and you can't even do a funeral like Mother Church, what with the candles and the incense....

13: GW Bush feels your pain.

"I had to face some very difficult spending decisions, and I've had to conduct sensitive diplomacy. That's called planning for a wedding,"

"The only information that I've received is that there are a number of Jenna's close friends who are not being invited to this wedding because, according to them, she would be afraid of their behavior," Doug Wead said.

But I was married at St. Pat's Fallowfield.

So, you know, grains of salt accordingly.

Becks, don't feel anticipatory sadness. I think you should really trust in your belief that they want you to be happy now and later. While it would be nice for everyone to be there on those big days, it's not all about the pictures. To a certain extent, it's not even about the memories, and that everyone shares that day with you and you with them. It is an experience that you'll have with whomever is around you, and the central figures will shift with each occasion. But I think it's wonderful that you have such a loving supportive family who wants your happiness first, and with whom you would love to share all the biggest moments of your life. That is worth more than the pictures or quick-to-fade memories.

I say this as one who will probably not have any of those pictures or memories, because I will very likely be disowned by my family upon marriage. I wish I had a family that wanted my happiness above all else, more than I want them to be there on those days. Another option is to wait till my dad dies, to spare him the pain of doing the worst thing a father can do--in either case, he would not be there, and this way, he's not heartbroken. But then I would be really unhappy. So, I have resolved that life is for the living, in both senses of the word "living."

I read that piece and it hit too close to home: my mother recently died so Mothers day is a bit painful but it was a beautifully written article and I just ordered Buxbaum's book.

Yeah, good article and all, but 15 affected me a hell of a lot more than ML did. I swear you all could replace modern American letters in a heartbeat.

14: getting married at a place with "fallow" in the name definitely enters you into some sort of relation with fate.

16: I'm sorry to hear about your mother, M.

getting married at a place with "fallow" in the name definitely enters you into some sort of relation with fate

A cousin of mine got married on the site of a Civil War battlefield. Sadly, the choice of venue did seem to prefigure the fate of the marriage.

I concur with 17.

We got married in a ghost town. No relatives within 1,000 miles.

I concur with 17. The situation in 15 is truly saddening: one has to measure the extent to which happiness is severable from the family life, not just in the short run for the wedding, but longer term as there are kids, kids' plays, graduations, family funerals for the older generation (aunts, uncles, grands, etc). One never wants to give in to blackmail of this type, but, on the other hand, coming into a situation where a certain diminished level of happiness is baked in is pretty tough.

Another agreement with 17

About the ML piece, while of course individual reactions and feelings differ, I think the zeitgeist has something to do with it too. My wife was 28, had just finished her PhD, and her mother had died suddenly less than 2 years before. So the "comps" are fairly close. She felt some of this, very keenly, but the wedding-industrial complex was much less intrusive and much more easily avoided. Similar choices—right down to the ivory dress and grey suit—carried much less baggage, I would guess.

By the time her sisters-in-law, also mature women in their thirties, members of our subculture, clean hippies, so to speak, but born in the mid-sixties, got married to her brothers about ten years ago, expectations seem to have been ratcheted way up. The ten years between had seen a sea change in portent.

Aw, Belle.

It's not that one can't have a simple wedding now. Two of my cousins and one of my friends did. But there seems to be no middle ground: either one is going for the big white wedding with the whole wedding-industrial complex or one is deliberately rejecting all of it.

I read Buxbaum as being justifiably proud of having made arrangements for a middle-ground wedding, but that it had been more wrenching than it might have been. But you may consider what she did, and what we did which I would describe in very similar terms, as simple or a deliberate rejection of all of it.

Isn't there some sort of protocol forbidding linkage to non-obnoxious Modern Loves? Does Unfogged have a meaningful central core? Is it merely a random sequence of meaningless posts? I fear that the answers are no, no, yes.

24: I think it's the guest list, partly: I could come up with the guest list for a very small wedding or a big wedding, but trying to do the medium sized version creates a lot of "you're inviting x but not y?!?"-type disputes.

Also, grey suits look better than tuxes.

26 - if it's obnoxity you're looking for, flip over to M-Dowd. She's really outdone herself this time, I'd say.

29: You can't make me.

"Obnoxity"? That's not even a back-construction. What is that? It's like you accidentally stepped on the word and decided to use it anyhow.

My dad died when I was eighteen and my brother was fifteen, so he has been absent for our entire adult lives. It didn't feel at all weird not having him there at my weddings, but even now it can sometimes be a bit disorienting raising kids (especially two boys) without being able to ask him any questions at all. Even if most of his answers would likely have been variations on "don't do it the way I did."

27: I was thinking more expectations than just the guest list, though that's part of it. If the wedding is only immediate family or very small, no one expects a lavish party afterwards. But it's hard to have (e.g.) 150 guests without having a reception that includes a meal.

I got married the year after my dad died; I really felt his absence then, and again when my daughters were born. I also used to feel sad and resentful around Fathers' Day, because it's so close to the anniversary of his death, until my girls were old enough to make me cute stuff.

At my first wedding, my living grandparents were dialed in by phone. Everyone shouted hello while one of my groomsmen held up a cell phone.

I got engaged for the second time the week after my mother's mother died, which seemed really appropriate at the time but which set off a string of neurotic reactions in my family.

Now wedding planning is stalled at the guest list, which was going to be under 200 until my future mother-in-law held an engagement party this weekend for 30 people who weren't on the list previously and said, "My daughter doesn't want anybody at her wedding who doesn't know her personally. So get to know her if you want to be invited to the wedding."

35.last: fiendish!

The easiest way to cut the guest list is to have half of the guests live in a different country and promise to do another reception the following year.

33: right, plus, with 75-100+, you can't just feed everyone by making a reservation at a restaurant you like.

Is this the thread for heartbreaking tales of family missing life events? Because I've got some doozies.

BYOJ (Bring Your Own Jerky), people. Problem solved!

If the best man in the picture in 7 didn't get lucky, then he must be a complete loser.

Who has a wedding with 5 bridesmaids and only one groomsman?

It could be just a bridal pic of those in the wedding party who were family (other four groomsman being friends or something.)

So Buxbaum's 50 guests, while obviously requiring a certain amount of careful planning, is "small," I take it.

IME, wedding are mostly about the families of the couple. My sense is that is even more true of the marriage.

I'm so pleased to say that this couldn't be less true in my case.

Also, from the article, my MIL was only minimally involved in our wedding; some of that was distance, but mostly I just don't think that the "weddings are about mothers and daughters" is all that true. AB is very attached to her mother, and she moved here to be near us, but the wedding wasn't about her at all.

42: Ah.

We didn't do the formal wedding picture thing, so I don't have a sense of all those permutations.

But I'm still more amused by the best man trying and failing, again and again, throughout the evening.

28: Yes!

But can I tell you, sadder than any dead mothers, is that moths ate the shit out of my wedding suit? It's not apparently portentous, but it's very upsetting.

a bit disorienting raising kids (especially two boys) without being able to ask him any questions at all

Yeah, same deal with my mom. But at least I have a really strong sense of her child-rearing, so that, other than the first couple terrifying months, I haven't had too many practical questions. But my dad is useless for "What were we like" questions, so that's frustrating.

44: I meant it mostly in a benign sense. My mom certainly didn't make the wedding all about her; it's probably better described as making sure that everything was done perfectly so I had nothing to regret, including bringing to my attention things that I did not know it was possible to regret, like napkins.

I meant more that practically speaking shivbunny now has gained three little sisters, and since we're very close, they tend to call a lot. Which meant when one of my sisters was having a senior project-related meltdown and called me while I was trying to get ready to go into work, after calming her down for 15 minutes, I handed the phone off to him.

31 - hey, if you prefer your words boring-style, there's plenty of other places to do your reading. If we can't do lexical creativity in the unfogged comments thread, where else can we turn?

So, is the wedding for the couple, one member thereof, or some defined population of their families? In our case, we tried to avoid these distinctions. Maybe that's not quite the right way to put it... We wanted the whole party aspect of it for ourselves, as an excuse to get all our friends together and have fun the way we chose. All about us! But we were only doing the formal church-like business for our families' sake. Even so, we tried to direct the vows and ceremonial aspects in a certain direction. Actually we wrote vows for us, and vows for everybody else present. Kind of trying to guilt our obnoxious families into acting like the kind of community we wanted them to be. It was a passive-aggressive ploy, for sure. But I felt good about it.

These threads always make me feel like I live in some parallel universe or something.

51: One in which the intergenerational resentment of mother and child isn't endlessly repeated?

No, that's what's so weird about it. My mom is, let us say, "difficult." Difficult enough that I didn't call her yesterday, or on her birthday, or on Easter (I haven't spoken to her since Xmas). But the wedding? Was pretty easy.

As far as families marrying families, in XIXc fiction and also in real life, and also in Chinese fiction, it often seems to happen that someone marries one sister/brother after first courting/being courted by a different sister/brother. As far as that goes, that happened in my family (the present wife of my sibling #3 first dates sibling #4).

Thoreau courted his brother's ex-fiancee but was shot down by her father. She took the initiative in switching brothers.

After I broke up with my HS GF, I finally noticed that her (1 year younger) sister was quite a bit more attractive. I was unable to effect any sort of transition.

Hmm, my HS BF's little brother has grown into quite the little stud. Let's see, X/2 + 7...

Thanks, everyone. I've been dealing with it for so long and trying to put on that brave face to justify how I could leave my family, so it's nice to have support and be allowed to admit "this sucks."

The good news is that my (white) boyfriend and I finally talked about it. Remember how I once asked how I could broach that topic with him, to give him constructive or actual notice that this is what it means to be with me and commit to a life with me since he was not Vietnamese?

He actually figured it out within the first month or two of our dating. He is fine with it, and really supportive of me. He doesn't blame me at all, as you all predicted. If we stay together (that is not as definite, but he is conferring with me about states he is willing to move to for my first teaching job), he knows what the deal will be, and we will deal with it together. So I'm glad I talked to him, and I'm glad to know that if we stay together and make a life-long commitment, that it's because he loves me in spite of all of the drama and will help me work through it.

Unfogged: the luuurve doctor.

Good luck, BL. What a heartbreaking situation.

Glad to hear, Belle L., that things are working out about as well as can be hoped under the circumstances.

We're currently wishing my mom was alive so my wife can ask her pregnant-with-twins questions. My dad hasn't been able to impart much practical advice, unless you count wide-eyed predictions of how big she's going to get, and occasionally throwing his head back and cackling at how screwed we are.

We are your family now, Belle. Have you met Crazy Aunt Bitch? Cousin Napi keeps the genealogy records.

We have some famous kin in D.C.

And let me tell you about our screwed up North Carolina cousins!

Thanks, Jesus.

Not to take the thread in another direction, but can I for once express my appreciation for American education? I grew up in such a racist household with my dad telling me that I would be disowned if I married outside of my race, and this and that vile calumny against this and that ethnic/racial group. That girls weren't allowed to do certain things, and that I shouldn't go to an Ivy League because I would fail, so instead I went to UCI (which is still good, of course).

But because of school, I learned about the Civil Rights movement and feminist movement back in junior high, and never looked back. I think I always knew to distrust my dad's racism, but learning more in school, and going to a diverse school really helped me get away from my dad's world view. And look, now: I did feminist activism in college, specialized in civil rights law in law school, and am currently doing employment discrimination law scholarship about family responsibilities discrimination. And I feel much more empowered now and I know that it's the right thing to do to act for my own happiness and marry whom I wish.

Not to thread jack, but thinking of how I escaped my potential fate as a close minded racist living under the thumb of her authoritarian father and stuck in a loveless arranged marriage--well, I say, thank you, America.

59: thanks, mrh. I'm sorry your mom can't be there, but double mazel tovs for your twins!

60: Does that make you the creepy Uncle Willy?

61!

unless you count wide-eyed predictions of how big she's going to get

At one of our expectant-parents-of-twins sessions, the presenter said that average weight gain for a twin pregnancy was 50-80 pounds. One of the guys asked, "And how much does the wife gain?"

My wife put on about 65, which brought her close to 200. I exhorted her to keep going—"When are you going to get this close to two bills again?"—but she maxed out at about 198.

65 pounds??? Half her body weight???? Wow.

Does that make you the creepy Uncle Willy?

Our family kisses everyone on the lips.

She was, to put it gently, fucking huge, and spent the last month in bed.

I exhorted her to keep going--"When are you going to get this close to two bills again?"--but she maxed out at about 198.

That is very funny.

spent the last month in bed

"Well now, that's exactly how you got yourself into this mess, young lady."

50-80 pounds

Wow. At 14 weeks, R's put on a total of 3 pounds so far, most of it in the form of cheese.

most of it in the form of cheese.

Like, toe cheese?

Ew. No, she is simply very efficiently converting dairy products to body mass.

At 14 weeks, R's put on a total of 3 pounds

Baby still only weighs an ounce and a half.

and occasionally throwing his head back and cackling at how screwed we are.

That's so great.

"Obnoxity"? That's not even a back-construction. What is that? It's like you accidentally stepped on the word and decided to use it anyhow.

Quite right. The appropriate back-construction would be "Obnoxiosity".

One could also make a case for "Obnoxiety", by parallel with "Anxiety", although the "Anxious"->"Anxiety" paradigm is unique and not part of an accepted pattern.

My sister put on 65 lbs. I think I put on maybe 45, 50? Don't remember. But yes. One gains a great deal of weight during pregnancy.

If I gained 80 pounds as the result of a pregnancy, I'd have a hard time letting shivbunny anywhere near me ever again. Unless he had a note from his doctor affirming a vasectomy. Or something. Ouch.

One gains a great deal of weight during pregnancy.

Lots of people do, but not everyone. My friend's wife, who's very skinny, looked, during even the very late stages of her first pregnancy (and now again, with baby #2), like she'd just slipped a basketball under her shirt.

She might still have gained a lot of weight. I mean, a good 10 lbs of my own weight gain was *just* the baby--never mind the placenta, the amniotic fluid, blah blah.

Oh, wow, congrats mrh! My only pregnant-with-twins advice is "anticipate mom being on bed rest in the last trimester." My best friend is expecting twins. After being put on bedrest, she got around to reading all the having-a-baby books they'd started accumulating and learning that bedrest is almost inevitable when you are expecting multiples. She wished she'd known that sooner and planned for it.

I saw a woman like the one described in 78, who works at the local library. Every week she looked more and more implausible, like she was an actress who had been given the world's worst fake-pregnancy prosthesis.

Thanks, Di! Our midwife promises that she doesn't go overboard prescribing bed rest or what they euphemistically term "pelvic rest."

But we're prepared for any eventuality. Go with the flow, that's our new motto. So far so good: we bought a new house and sold ours in only two weeks. I think it was the Zen.

My mother looked like she had a basketball under her shirt, despite not being a very slightly built woman. (She's small, but doesn't look delicate.) I've heard a lot of it is in how your pelvis is shaped.

But she didn't gain all that much weight either, around 30 pounds.

obnoxiety is easier to pronounce than obnoxiosity

My s-i-l is a big, not fat, woman, and she put on around 20 lbs. As I've said, she's in the 1% who can menstruate while pregnant (double uterus or something) so she really didn't know until the 8th month or so. The kid is 30+ now and fine.

I envy those women who only gain in their stomach region. Even now, just an extra 5 lbs will be spread all over, as I gain in my face and arms, midsection, thighs...I will look SO fat when I get pregnant.

You also gotta remember that there's a certain weight gain in the boobs alone.

I'm considering linking to my cousin's "baby-blog," because his wife was really, really thin and it's interesting to see what she currently looks like (most recent pic at 21 weeks), but even though it's a public blog it doesn't seem like the kind of thing I should point random people on the internet to. I mean, what about the people who read the comments but don't post? I don't know anything about them.

You're worried about the lurkers? If I were your cousin's wife, I wouldn't want *Apo* reading my blog.

You also gotta remember that there's a certain weight gain in the boobs alone.

This reminds me, I wonder how much weight gain the pregnant man is experiencing. I hope he has a blog.

61 made me all sniffly and warmed the cockles of my cold, tiny heart.

Bring back the pants video!

61 is awesome.

I envy those women who only gain in their stomach region

It kind of sucks, actually. You know how people gush all over pregnant women? Most of the pregnancy, I was only noticeably pregnant to those who knew me beforehand. I got, like, no attention at all. Terrible.

At least you yourself knew, Di. My s-i-l's notification phone call to my brother in the eight month began "You better sit down". They were working at separated locations at the time.

She knew that time. Maybe she's pregnant right now!!!

95: That seems kind of ideal, actually. It's like being pregnant for only one month!

She knew that time. Maybe she's pregnant right now!!!

Sadly, that would be an event with biblical significance at this point...

what they euphemistically term "pelvic rest."

We had this in the early part of AB's pregnancy, thanks to a low placenta. By the time the placenta was back in its proper place, her belly had gotten big enough that we had really missed out on the early, carefree, fun pregnancy sex. Not that the later sex is bad, but it becomes more logistical, if you will.

I envy those women who only gain in their stomach region

Iris, last week (and several times since): "I've noticed that as your belly gets plumper with Brother, your bottom is getting bigger too."

We had always liked having an observant child before.

95: That would suck. Especially trying to explain to everyone ho it is possible that you didn't know.

100: A perfect opportunity to start modelling positive body image stuff for Iris.

Especially trying to explain to everyone ho it is possible that you didn't know.

"As a ho, I've found that more things are possible than I had once imagined."

100: When I was a toddler, I apparently attempted to console my mother by saying "It's okay, little fat cheeks. don't cry!"

I have mentioned this before, but my crazy then-wife was flat on her back in the hospital from December 1 to December 31 (when our son was born). Despite her normal nasty demeanor, she was wonderful during that time period.

I try to reflect on that good deed when she acts nasty now.

102: Absolutely. I actually haven't witnessed this comment firsthand, so I'm not sure exactly what AB says in response, but I assure you it's not, "I know, I hate it."

Interestingly, Iris recently observed that my dad is "plump" (her preferred term), but that my MIL isn't. My MIL is very far from petite (and probably outweighs my 6'-4" dad), but it's evenly-distributed; my dad is tall and thin, except for his big gut. Context is everything.

106: The kid's got a good eye for health risk.

61: That really is wonderful; it's exactly what you hope the public schools do, and having it confirmed that it really does work sometimes is such a great thing.

Weight gain with pregnancy is weird -- I gained about 40 lbs with Sally, only lost twenty inbetween, and then only gained twenty with Newt. I appear to be programmed to deliver at 180, regardless of my starting point. I get the impression that it's almost completely preset: your body is going to gain the amount it wants to, and there's not much you can or should do about it one way or the other.