Testing times*

I had a bit of a wedding breakdown. I think I suspected as much. It is exactly 8 weeks out now.

It started slow. (Yeah…I’m going to whinge, so please, feel free to tune out)

I had a dress fitting that was not very successful. My dress… errr… foundation? Needs to be redone, and that doesn’t fill a girl with confidence. I found myself apologising that I had lost 1cm (ONE centimetre!) from around my hips, making the fit wrong. Also, that I had wide boobs. Wide boobs. Yep.

Remember I bought a really awesome necklace? On Ebay? It arrived and it was too small. Only by a little… but that little meant a constant feeling of choking. When I went to see the jeweller, he quoted me more than it cost to buy the damn thing to put an extension in.

My shoes arrived. Those of you on twitter may have heard this already, but I don’t love them. The ankle strap is wrong and I think unflattering to my calf muscles. J argues that we won’t see my calf muscles. But I will know.

We are offering two red wines and two whites at the reception, and my Dad, being Mr Organisation, wants to order them last week. J’s favourite white is a Semillon, and mine is a Pinot Gris or Grigio, which we thought were a good balance. My parents** want to offer Chardonnay. And had narrowed it down to three. Which meant, choose your wines right now. The photo above is of me trying a heinous Chardonnay, thankfully with macarons to save the occasion from being completely disappointing. I don’t like a huge majority of Chardonnay. I hate Semillon. So what am I going to drink with my seafood entree? I know this seems ridiculously small.

We started making our invites, as I mentioned in the last post. I finished painting them, and I cut them out, and I went to the printer to talk paper and scanning. I came home and spent 2 hours on the phone to mum discussing the merits of writing “Decline” vs “Unable to Attend” and other such thrilling invite wording etiquette. I looked at the invite again. It looks amateur. And then I found myself in tears to J.

“I don’t love anything about this wedding! I’m just so disappointed in so many things! I hate the invite, I hate my shoes, my dress doesn’t look good, the lampshades look like a circus explosion***, I hate chardonnay. I just want to LOVE something to do with this wedding. I don’t expect it to be perfect, but I just want to be happy with stuff, you know?”

This is not a new Emma phenomenon and J knows it. I am always the person who will look at every single pair of red ballet flats in the mall before choosing the first pair I looked at. I’m that person. And in this, the hugest party I’m ever likely to throw, OF COURSE that trait is going to be ugly. Of course I want every element to be cohesive and gorgeous, and I am really sad that I just can’t seem to pull things together. And now we are running out of time, and I can’t see it all suddenly melding into one lovely heap of wedding day. I REALLY don’t want to look at something on the day and feel like we could have done it better.

I know that you’re all thinking, “but on the day, you won’t look at all that stuff! It will be a blur! You will be so giddy with love and all you’ll see are people’s smiling faces!”

I know. But also… no. I am a cold, emotionless human sometimes. I know I will not get carried away in the love for 100% of the day. I know I will feel detached and awkward amongst people’s hugs and greetings, and I know I will take in my surroundings with a critical eye. I have this problem stemming from my work, where I can’t enjoy a movie because I’m so busy analysing every detail of the costuming. Renee Zellweger’s collar in the court scene of Chicago kills me to this day (It’s longer on one side than the other).

I don’t want that to happen on my wedding day, but I’m pretty sure that I won’t just suddenly be some changed person. I’m not saying I will get to the reception and cry because the lantern green doesn’t match the ribbon green – but I want to feel happy about things and I don’t want anything to cloud my day, I suppose.

… Now that I’ve written it out it sounds completely ridiculous. Poor little bride to be wants everything to look amazing or she’s going to feel a failure? Please. But I don’t know what to do to get out of this funk. I know that focussing on J and I, and thinking beyond the day, is what’s truly important. I would never doubt that for a second. But it’s annoying me that I can’t seem to get the secondary details at peace in my head.

The other day I said to J, “I wish there was no wedding.”  and he said, “I know, we are so happy as we are.”  But we do want it. We want to celebrate with our families and friends, we want to eat, dance, look hott in our outfits. It’s just… hard right now.

* This post was supposed to be about testing wines, testing hair, testing flower arrangements. It turned into the other meaning. Whoops!

** My parents are dears and love wine. They are excited and choosing the wines is a big thing which I would never begrudge them. But, heinous chardonnay = sadface.

*** The lampshades are extremely bright and would not look out of place under the big top.