Prepping for the ring

Emotionally Engaged: A Bride's Guide to Surviving the "Happiest" Time of Her Life - Alison Moir-Smith (Hudson Street Press, 2006)

I was expecting the wedding-planning stress. I don't like event planning. Several times before even meeting my future husband, I suggested the desirability of a "surprise wedding." In my vision, I'd be engaged, and I'd probably even have some say over the guest list and maybe some other broad details. But essentially just one morning someone would wake me up and say, "Okay, this is the day. Let's go" and hustle me into the dress and off to the ceremony site. All details handled. Obviously there are enough problems with this scenario that I didn't use it as much of a guide in planning my actual wedding. But still...

What I thought less about what the transition that the wedding marked, that the engagement was the transitory space between being single and being married. And that one is truly fundamentally different from the other. It was a good reminder that much of the planning stress isn't just about planning an event, but is also indicative of the broader changes going on in almost all of your relationships.

So Moir-Smith talks about her own challenges during her engagement, and how she turned to her own MFT training to try to get in touch with how she was feeling, and why. And then how she turned that into a professional practice, and also the book. She invites the reader to go deep, and grieve where necessary, and feel ALL the feelings.

Among the things that change: your own sense of identity -- saying goodbye to Single You; your relationship with your family; your relationship with your partner; your relationship with your friends (particularly the single ones). Beyond those, Moir-Smith offers advice on how to stay emotionally present and engaged not only throughout the engagement, but also during the wedding and honeymoon, and into marriage. Some of this seemed inapplicable to me and my life, but other parts of it really forced me to look at some things that were going on from a different perspective.

I read this long enough ago that I went back and re-read it this week, with a more critical and skeptical eye. Not sure why the change. I walked away glad that I read it, and glad that I engaged with the questions and emotions raised by the book, but also a little wary that I not "create" tensions that don't exist simply for the sake of doing the process "correctly." Everyone's journey is going to be different, and I maybe could have used a little more of a reminder of that. Maybe then, this is the sort of book that benefits most by being read more than once.

I'm going to be throwing a huge party

A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration - Meg Keene (Da Capo Press, 2012)

Offbeat Bride: Creative Alternatives for Independent Brides - Ariel Meadow Stallings (Seal Press, 2010)

Ladies, thank you for helping save my sanity (so far). The blogs A Practical Wedding and Offbeat Bride came across my radar pretty quickly after I succumbed and created a (private) wedding Pinterest board. They seemed chill, and interested in bumping up the parts of a wedding that I cared about, and savvy about how to help you downplay the parts that weren't important to me. (And also really awesome about the fact that everyone's going to have their individual lists of what is and isn't important.)

But there are also books! Stallings's book (well, the first edition) predated the blog, and Keene's came out of her blog. And I tried to get them both from the library, but when OB proved hard to get, I went to the store. And after reading my library copy of APW, I was back at the store to get my very own.

[Note to the universe: would LOVE LOVE LOVE more independent bookstores in my area]

I'm going to suck at reviewing these, and perhaps the most important reviews will come after the Big Event, but both were complementarily (a word?) so helpful. Keene's book made me weepy pretty much once a chapter, while Stallings was more likely to make me giggle. Both are filled with history and examples and ideas about how to navigate the path from getting engaged to getting hitched (or not). And both offered hugely practical advice. (Keene: cross out almost everything on those other sites' "to do" lists, which reminds me, the Offbeat Bride checklist has made me really really happy, even if still overwhelmed. Stallings: consider all the aspects about who will be your best wedding party members, if you have a wedding party.) There's tons of overlap, although Stallings is geared toward a decided more eclectic crowd.

I've set the books aside, as my December is filled up with non-wedding stuff, but you had better believe that come January, these babies will get all sorts of use.

Something old, something new

The Singles - Meredith Goldstein (Plume, 2012)

This novel dips into two of my favorite genres: the chick lit (naturally) and the college-friends-in-their-lives-after-college that has the potential to cross into literary fiction.

And it's set at a wedding (a commonplace venue for the latter type mentioned above) - a time of hubbub and ridiculousness that feels familiar smack in the midst of the holiday season.

It's Bee's wedding. Don't get too attached to Bee though, because although there are all sorts of interesting hints about her and her relationships to the people around her, we really don't get to meet her much. It's really about the group that at most other weddings would be tossed together at the "singles" table, but for some reason aren't here: three college friends (one of whom is a bridesmaid), an uncle, and the groom's mother's friend (or rather, her son).

Chapters skip from the perspective of one to the next. Over the course of the evening, each undergoes a crisis (or two or three) and as they bump into each other, you get hints of the ways they might yet come to be one another's saviors. Although there are plenty of red herrings thrown in. And in the end (spoiler? I guess?) each emerges from Bee's wedding ready to enter a new stage of life, perhaps even more so than Bee herself.

Maybe I've done it wrong, but I've never had quite this experience at a wedding. But then again, that's probably for the best.