The other side of the wedding fence... sort of

Life right now feels too big to encapsulate in a blog post. Mostly because nothing is happening beyond me feeling incredibly overwhelmed by everything that needs to happen and that's not particularly easy to write about.

People warned me that I could face post-wedding blues. That all the glitzy glamouryness of the wedding would leave a big wedding sized hole in my life.

I don't feel this way.

In fact, I have decided that while I loved my wedding, and while wearing a ridiculous-but-beautiful white dress for a day totally lived up to the superstar princess celebrity feeling I'd secretly dreamed of, other people's weddings are much more fun. At other people's weddings you just happily accept food and drink and more food and more drink and do not notice that the canapes seem to have shrunk or that the caterers have neglected to tell vegetarians that there is an option other than pork and lamb. And you most certainly do not obsess over napkin quality (that one comes with a warning - steer clear of napkin conversation with me for the next er 5 - 10 years ). At other people's weddings these details are irrelevant and unperceived (except perhaps if you're a vegetarian or napkin enthusiast.)

So, I have resolved never to get married again and to enthusiastically attend all the other-people's weddings I can.

I do however miss the excuse that the wedding provided. Everything I didn't want to do was put off until after the wedding - casually thrown over the wedding fence, mounting and piling into a big life-sized to-do list just waiting for the wedding and honeymoon and week-of-jet-lag-recovery to be over.

And now here we are.

So rather than doing what I should be doing, here is a list of what I learned over the past few wedding-filled months:
1. That I need to get over my need to appease people because I really just end up pissing off everyone.
2. That the steak and ale pie served at The Plough (in Dibley) is delicious and should always be ordered in preference over fish and chips.
3. That Jeremy cannot be trusted to share his steak and ale pie.
4. That I'm writing a novel (as announced by my dad in his speech...)
5. That I'm a saint (as announced by my father-in-law in his speech)
6. That if you're holding hands with someone when dancing and they fall over, you may end up damaging your finger for life.
7. That I have Miss Havisham tendencies that absolutely need to be suppressed
8. That Jeremy is capable of dancing - sort of - but it takes the peer pressure of 100+ people to make him do it.
9. That England can always be trusted to produce terrible weather
10. That I should never underestimate the power of Dibley - from accommodating guests to donating metric tons of hydrangeas to church transformation. That village is one of a kind.
11. That Jess is guaranteed to do something like turn an electric toothbrush covered in toothpaste on while wearing her bridesmaids dress...

I think I knew the last one already.

Post ceremony with the Dibley river and mist for a background. 

Evening attire and one of Abbie's amazing cupcakes.

The original Italy crowd, 7 years on. 

A particularly cold gust of wind.

My wonderful bridesmaids, who did an amazing job attempting to keep me sane. Hats off to Abbie for braving the Stratton Family madness and emerging unscathed.

Decompression

Later this week I will rewind back 3 weeks or so and recap on all the adventures of Wedding preparation and the Dibley Flower Army and grooms with flu and sprained fingers and sleeper trains and honeymoon scooters on the French Riviera. For now though, I'm sat on Helen's bed, trying (and failing...sorry) not to get slightly-scorched croissant crumbs on her bed (The no-croissant diet is being put off for the foreseeable future), drinking coffee and gearing myself up to shower and head to richmond for a day of coffee and shopping and probably a fair amount of cider with a conveniently unemployed friend.

Two days in London before heading 'home'. It feels like a Hannah Decompression Chamber. I don't thnk anyone has ever referred to London as decompression before. Normally it's total compression, in the form of packed tube-trains, sucking all the air out of you and cramming you in to the tune of 'can you move up please' (seriously, who are the people who say that?). But these few days are allowing me to become accustomed again to my family being further away, to me being the independent adult that I'm supposed to be, before I really do the distance and resume life in Waltham.

I'm not sad about going back. Ahead of us is moving house (I'm far more excited about this than Jeremy is) and me getting a job (Jeremy is far more excited about that than I am) and me learning to drive (neither of us is looking forward to the effort required for that to actually happen). Lots of busy, good, life-building things.

I am sad to leave though. There is always a moment when I say goodbye to the crucial people when it feels like the air has been moved just out of reach and I have to gasp to find it.

Which is why saying goodbye in stages is helpful and good. From the hugs of family to the hugs of friends to the free wine and strangely comforting food of BA, I am decompressing back into a person who can handle living 3000 miles away.

(Jeremy is guaranteed to be asked to confirm about 10 times a day this week that yes, one day, we will live in England.)

Packing...

I'm supposed to be packing, but writing about packing is far easier than actually packing so here I am.


Usually I don't find packing hard at all. I chuck a ton of stuff in bag and trust that Jeremy will have remembered all the essentials I've forgotten. Or that I can buy them when we get there (hence the ridiculous number of sun-cream bottles, plasticky hair-brushes and cheap sun-glasses that we own).

This time packing is different. For every item of clothing that I put on the bed, ready to be smushed into my suitcase, my heart does a double beat. It sounds like this:

Wed-ding.

Somehow I have to pack for 2 weeks of English summer (which means packing for most countries' 4 seasons), a week of backpacking in France and a wedding. Even if we ignore for the moment the massive wedding dress that I'll be hand-luggaging my way to England with, it's still going to be a lot of stuff.

Meanwhile, whilst packing rain-coats and bikinis, jeans and summer-skirts I'm also processing my return to the motherland. So much has changed and I'll be seeing so many people who it's broken my heart not to see. Just thinking about it overwhelms me.

I know from past experience that the England I left will not be the England I'll return to. I will have changed - there will be inflections in my accent, new mannerisms, 'bad' table-manners (no judgment - it's way easier your way...) that will distinguish me as not-quite English and if other people aren't aware of it then I will be anyway. That doesn't worry me too much though. What worries me is that I'm only now beginning to shake the homesickness, to settle here and accept the distance. Am I going to lose all that ground?

Stop rolling your eyes at me. I am NOT complaining. I can't wait to be back in the UK, knowing my way around and being understood and having EVERYONE I love most in the world in one errrr tent for a night. I'm just aware it's going to be a little odd and saying goodbye is never ever easy.

Which is my excuse for packing very very slowly.

Getting married while being married...

Getting married when you're already married is a curious thing. Not only does it confuse the heck out of grandparents (I think I reassured Jeremy's Grandma about 20 times this weekend that yes, we are already married), it also frames the whole ceremony and process entirely differently to what I imagine most brides experience.

Case in point. I've been searching for readings / poems to be read during the ceremony and I've been struggling to find ones that honestly speak to the heart of marriage - that capture the terror and the trust and the beauty of it all. Things that I don't think most people truly realise until way after the ceremony planning is done.

Because being married is near beyond description. I don't want to come across like one of those couples (we know who you are) who seem to imagine they've taken on celebrity status upon sharing surnames. Getting married is hardly an original thing to do. But there's something magical about it that even I, a die-hard follower of the hopeless-romantic school of thought, could never have imagined and I'm still busy marveling at the whole thing.

I think because the act of getting married is so deadly terrifying - promising forever to someone when you have absolutely no control over what forever might throw at you,  there is such a profound depth of trust placed both in yourself and in your partner. And this trust wraps around you both and creates a space of comfort and confidence that is unimaginable before you get married.

That said, the every day details of life don't change. We're still incredibly messy. It still drives me crazy that he doesn't flush the toilet when he pees and that to get into our house you must first navigate an obstacle course of tomatoes and hoses and a watering can with a sock wrapped around it, brewing 'worm 'tea' (don't ask...). I know it annoys him that I always forget to wring out the kitchen sponge and that I don't care which way the toilet roll goes onto the thingy.

There are still times when I think of 'forever' and my stomach tips with vertigo before I mentally place 'forever' in the context of day-by-day and the dizziness recedes. But it's that luminous trust that binds us - that step together Indiana Jones style (if you've been to as many christian camps as I did growing up you'll know that clip well) into the unknown, stepping into each day together and securing this life of ours so that it is able to face future storms - that is what I want to communicate in the marriage ceremony and what I want to re-promise.

Here's the closest poem I've found so far, although given the choice I'd sub in prawn cocktail crisps for popcorn...

Habitation - Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder at having survived even this far
we are learning to make fire. 

Wedding Countdown and More Lists to be Ticked...

There's under two months to go until wedding no.2 and the nightmares have started.

I'd thought I was pretty well prepared - I'd done a lot before leaving England and it was really just sundries and a few loose ends left. Nothing to stress about.

Apparently my subconscious disagrees.

In my subconscious, I am the epitome of flaky disorganisation. I forget to do flowers, my dress is a foot too long because I've forgotten to have it taken up and I have mean friends who spitefully throw massive glasses of water all over me. For some reason I haven't yet dreamed about Jeremy not showing up, which is actually a valid concern because he hasn't booked his tickets yet and I have. I did manage to veto his master plan of flying via Iceland though. There's a reason why those tickets are cheaper. That volcano may have quietened down for the time being, but that's no reason to go and taunt it.

Needless to say, my wedding related anxiety has been slowly but surely mounting in the past two weeks.It's an ongoing dialogue between Jeremy and I that has no end. Or rather, it's an ongoing monologue where every now and again in the middle of unrelated conversation I'll throw in a task that we really really need to do and Jeremy attempts to ignore me. I am not easily ignored. Jeremy's solution to try and stop my anxious wheedling is to book in wedding time. Whole chunks of time devoted to wedding related chores and in return I'm supposed to not worry aloud for the rest of the week.

I do not keep my side of the bargain.

Wedding time does work though. On Tuesday we bought Jeremy's suit and our rings all within the space of about 2 hours. On the way home, all I could think about was the satisfaction I would get from ticking those jobs off the list on the fridge. I was genuinely excited about it - one big permanent marker tick per job. Maybe two in the wedding ring box because there were two rings. For once my wedding chatter was about tasks accomplished and ticking...

We got home and I momentarily forgot about ticking and went to the loo or made tea or ate part of the mountain of carrot cake that is the result of my bridal shower and me having chosen a not-universally-loved cake flavour (and my sister in law buying a cake for 45 people when the shower was comprised of 15. I'm not complaining though, I have enough cake to last at least a week)...

When I returned, marker in hand to tick off my list I found to my horror that Jeremy had already done it. Not even a good tick either, the sort of half-arsed badly proportioned tick that only a malicious left-handed husband could do. While he chuckled in the background I morosely traced over his ticks.

It did not have the same effect.

The phrase 'candy from a baby' comes to mind, although in that story I'm the baby so that's not great.

Never fear, there are many more tasks on the list and I shall get my own back by nagging him to death.

Jeremy. You really need to book your flights. Now.

I'm serious.

 

Wedding planning and sticking it to tradition.

I am not a fan of weddings. I have been a bridesmaid six times and, coming from small town Somerset, most of my friends were married before they reached puberty. OK that’s an exaggeration, but it certainly felt that way.

As a veteran bridesmaid, I have been the person holding the beautiful but enormous and impractical dress above the bride’s head as she pees, I’ve set up and cleaned up countless reception halls (well, not countless, but quite a few). I’ve stood in strapless dresses in mid-December in unheated churches trying not to turn blue, stood at the head of aisles in front of entire congregations trying to suppress giggles for less than conventional entrances and been caught on camera with a grimace of disgust at the use of ‘Wives submit to your husbands’ (yes, I know it goes on to say love your wives as you love yourself and that therefore it’s not grossly sexist blah blah blah. It’s still an unacceptable sentence.).

I’ve scaled mountains, ventured north of Birmingham, eaten sheep-head pâté and barn-danced until the world spun – all in loving support of my friends nuptials. But all the while I was thinking ‘I’d do this differently’. [I should here insert the caveat that prevents all my bridefriends from revoking my former bridesmaid status – your wedding was different. I’m talking about all the other weddings. (Seriously though, your weddings were unique to you and I loved them for you, but not for me…have I saved my traitorous bridesmaid butt?)]

For someone who isn’t a fan of weddings I’ve spent a lot of time planning my own. Since I was 5 and first put that lace curtain over my head, I’ve been crafting and preparing the perfect wedding. My number one aim is to avoid all unnecessary stress. I’ve already partially failed in this – wedding politics seem to lurk in every lacy corner – but I’m determined to get through without compromising on core values. These are:
- Never sticking bits of ribbon onto bits of lace onto bits of card
- Not spending obscene amounts of money because tradition says I have to
- Prioritising fun
- Not being a hypocrite

To that end, I may as well warn you all (those of you who know me that is – the rest of you won’t be invited) of the upcoming tradition-busting, convention-rocking, sanity-keeping decisions:

- We are emailing (yes, I said emailing) our invites. I have enough bits of paper to manage with the EVA (Everlasting Visa Application, remember?) without having to get all sticky and stressed about handmade invites. Also it’s environmentally friendly so we will gain Carbon-guilt-points (which will promptly be used 1000000 times over by the flights people will make to come to the wedding) and it’s cheap and therefore not wasting money on unnecessary traditions. Oh and you can RSVP online and it keeps track of them all. Genius idea. Add paperlesspost@paperlesspost.com to your address book now to ensure it doesn’t get gobbled up by spam. And don’t go expecting a save-the-date, there’s not going to be one. Silly American idea which duplicates work.

- We are getting married in a church. OK that doesn’t sound particularly tradition-busting, but in order to combat the not-being-a-hypocrite value, I had to have a squirm-worthy conversation with the Vicar where I explained I was a Christian but Jeremy wasn’t so would it be ok if we tweaked some of the words a little? Answer: you’ll already be legally married so you can do what you want and well done for not compromising your integrity. He’s a very cool vicar.

- There will not be hymns in the church. My parents virtually fell over when I told them this. It’s OK. There will be music (no we’re not going to all start singing pop-songs, I just meant down the aisle and back), I just don’t want that awkward half-the-guests-don’t-know-the-words moment(s).

- I’m not having a colour scheme. I can’t be bothered. Hydrangeas come in all colours, as will my wedding. Just wait until you see the bridesmaid dresses. No, Ali, they’re not tie-dyed.

- We’re having cupcakes, not cake-cake. Because cupcakes are awesome.

- We’re not having a band. I know this isn’t that unusual but it allows me to tell my favourite-so-far wedding conversation:
Dad: so are you having a band?
Hannah: no, we don’t really want one
Dad: but bands are nice
Hannah: I know, but Jeremy and I aren’t that bothered – we just don’t really want one
Dad: Well it’s not about what you want Hannah
Hannah: (in fits of laughter) ummmmm yes Dad I think it is

Dad has since seen the funny side of this exchange and has accepted the error of his wedding-ways. I just find it funny.

Oh and we’ll already have been legally married for about 7 months by the time people watch me walk down the aisle. I just hope I still like him. Kidding.

So prepare yourselves for untraditional brilliance. I hope. At the very least it’ll be fun. The formula of good food, friends, wine / beer / local ciders and Beyonce hasn’t failed me yet.