The Wedding

So I may have mentioned I was getting married a while back… a looooong while back, since the wedding itself was 2 months ago.

Here’s the story of that week.

Wednesday.  T-3 days
My fiancé C has been off since Friday and this is my first day off.  I have to run downtown to pick up my glasses… there was an issue with my bank card the night before, so the woman who helped me set it all up with her manager than I could come in today and pay for them and then they’d be ready in an hour.  I really want new glasses before the wedding because one lens still has a huge scratch in it (I almost took my eye out with a paint scraper helping my alderman’s office remove signs from light poles the year before) and I want new prescription sunglasses before my awesome honeymoon in California.  I get to the eyeglass store and the glasses ring up as almost $100 more expensive than last night.  There’s no way I can afford that.  I freak out.  I cry a little.  I leave angrily, determined to come back tomorrow.   I start getting a headache at this time, obviously due to stress.  I’m sure the sore throat is due to stress too.  They’ll both go away with some rest.  I meet C for breakfast and we head out to look at some flowers we want for decorations…. We get tired of looking and I need to get down to my mom’s house to check a sweater I bought against the flower girl dresses.  I drive 45 miles to their house.  The sweaters that looked off-white in the store are obviously yellow against the off-white dresses.  Great.  Luckily, while I’m down here, I find the perfect green dancin’ shoes for the reception at a store down here and for cheap!  While I’m at the store, I also pick up some cough drops and aspirin to fend off this pesky stress headache and stress sore throat.  Especially since I’m also starting to get some stress joint stiffness and stress back pain.   I get home and realize that I’m actually feeling pretty crappy.  C goes to have dinner with his dad who’s flown in for the wedding, while I curl up on the couch.  I’m starting to have some stress chills, so we pile on the blankets (bad idea!) and I fall asleep.  When I wake up a couple hours later, I am BURNING.  My temperature, which is usually a bit below normal, is up over 100.  I text C and tell him I’m headed to bed because I have a stress-fever (Yeah, I was still in denial… it didn’t last much longer).  After lying in bed for a while, I take my temperature again and it’s over 103.  I start googling “dangerous temperature for adults”.  It doesn’t make me feel better.

Thursday.  T-2 days
I wake up today and feel like hell. The fever seems to have broken overnight, so at least I’m in less danger of cooking my brain.  I text my sister, who is in town and coming in for an awesome sister fun day we’ve planned, where we were going to get her hair cut, and then mani/pedis, and then a bachelorette party with my closest lady friends: dinner at a vegetarian diner and bowling afterwards.  I tell my sister I will promise not to touch her, but that we might have to cancel the festivities tonight.  I still plan on hanging out with her today because I am Not That Sick.  I then get texts from both my sister and my mom telling me to go to the doctor and cancel all other things I had to do before Saturday.  Sadly, I realize they are right and email my friends to say the party’s canceled.  Then I call my doctor and the earliest I can get in is tomorrow.  I lay on the couch all day, feeling like death and getting a fever again that night (not as bad though, whew!)  Poor C is running around all day trying to finish up all the things I’d been working on for the wedding.  I try and work on the tables some more and make place tags, but I keep falling asleep.   C takes my glasses in to get replaced and then comes back to get me an hour later to pick them up.  Then I go back to sleep.

Friday.  T-1 day
I wake up feeling like the side of my head is going to EXPLODE.  The pain and the constant ringing in my right ear are pretty good indicators that this is the worst ear infection I’ve had in 20 years.   I can barely move it hurts so bad.  I just want to claw the side of my head off and keep pathetically swiping at my ear.  C drives me to the doctor and drops me off because he still needs to get a haircut and was busy taking care of me and my stuff yesterday.  The doctor looks in my ear and sucks in her breath.  Not really a thing you want to hear.  She tells me I have a horrible ear infection and she’s putting me on antibiotics.
Me:  So, here’s the thing.  I’m getting married tomorrow.
Her: Congratulations!
Me:  Yeah.  So, I’m getting on a plane to California for my honeymoon on Monday… is that going to be a problem?
Her:  Is there anyway you can postpone it?
Me:  By a day?
Her:  More like a couple weeks.

Wah wahhhhh.  Yeah.  That’s not possible.  She gives me a prescription and a promise to write a letter if the airlines need it.  C picks me up and I break the news: the wonderful honeymoon he has carefully planned has to be completely scrapped.  I would cry if it wouldn’t just make me hurt even more.   We get home and I lay down on the couch while C starts calling the airlines and hotels.   I feel like I’m dying.  A few hours later, he has to drive to pick up my college friend at the train – she’s the pastor officiating our wedding and is driving the 45 miles down with us tonight for the rehearsal.   I try and pack, but I’m in so much pain and have taken Sudafed so I can’t even function.  I end up forgetting at least 6 things.  Including the flower crowns for the flower girls that my awesome cousin went back to get for us.

Rehearsal time: We are more than 30 minutes late, due to massive traffic back-ups.  We hold the rehearsal in record time, since it’s outside and about 45 degrees out.  We keep assuring our family that the weather reports I was reading said it would be in the 60s the next day.  After the rehearsal dinner, which I barely remember, we make a necessary trip to Target for forgotten toiletries as well as both pajamas and clean underwear, both of which I’ve forgotten.   Then we fold programs and start on the place tags.  I fall asleep while C is writing out names.

Saturday.  Wedding Day

I wake up around 9 am, about 2 hours before we need to leave to be at the site to help get it ready.  Aaaaand….. I have no voice.  I literally cannot speak at all.  I try taking a hot shower and it barely works, but at least I can squeak out a few syllables.  The weather report says it’s in the upper 30s and I see snowflakes in the air when I look out the window.   We reluctantly make the decision to move the ceremony inside and try and contact let everyone possible know, so they know they don’t have to wear long underwear under their dress clothes.  C also calls his mom to ask her to pick up a guestbook, and a friend of his to ask him to pick up some numbers for the tables… all of which we’ve forgotten to do.

I sit down to finalize the playlists for the reception, one of several tasks that was supposed to get down while I was off work, before I got too sick to move.  And they’re gone.  Everything is gone.  Apparently I’d built them while my phone was plugged into the laptop to charge, and some of the music was on my phone and some was on the computer.  Everything is completely messed up.  At this point I just start crying, except it sounds sorta like a squirrel crying because I can barely make any noise.  I can’t talk.  The extra decorations we had wanted to get we didn’t have time to get with me being sick.  The Sudafed is making me delirious and I can’t function.  We had to move the ceremony indoors.  I didn’t get to have my sister day or my bachelorette party.  We’re running late.  The music is all gone.  I have a huge pimple on my chin.  I’m just completely overwhelmed and stressed out and it feels like EVERYTHING is going wrong.

All along, I’d been saying, “It doesn’t matter what happens the day of the wedding, as long as we end up married at the end”.  I guess it’s time to put my money where my mouth is.  C hugs me, tells me he loves me and that it’s all going to be alright.  And then my crying turns into a coughing fit and we have to keep getting ready because we really are running late.  C runs the stuff we had over to the site while I build up 90 minutes of music from scratch.  The woman who works at the Forest Preserve where we were holding the wedding actually ended up assigning table numbers to our guests, since we’d divided them up but forgotten to number them.  We would end up plugging C’s phone into our speakers and giving our friend who was MC-ing free rein to download music and build a reception playlist.

And then it was a whirlwind of getting ready and adorable little girls and tears with my mom and laughter with my sister and my future sister-in-law helping me put on makeup so I look a little less dead.

My mom helps me put on my great-great-grandmother’s necklace, which my mom also wore when she got married

My veil is made out of my mom’s veil from the 70’s

Pinning the veil in place

My amaaaazing peacock shoes!

C preparing

C’s boutonniere

We line up to walk in, with me in the back so C can’t see me.   My sister, the best woman, has a stash of Kleenexes not only for my tears but also because the Sudafed is really cleaning me out.

And then I step into the makeshift aisle, in the hall where the reception tables are already set up, flanked by my parents, Yo-Yo Ma and James Taylor playing “Here Comes the Sun” playing on the speakers.  And when I lock eyes with my husband-to-be, everything else disappears.  Not just from my thoughts, but literally, from sight.  The rest of the room is out of focus compared to him and I know that this is the most right I have ever been.

We may have had to move it inside, but what an inside it was.

The wedding went off without a hitch.  I managed to squeak out my vows… most people thought I was overcome with emotion, so even that worked out okay.

Fancy shoes for the both of us

Love

The reception was also pretty fantastic, with great food, great company, great dancing.   We did actually run out of food, but the servers felt bad and ordered a few pizzas for us.  And now we have great stories to tell and amazing memories and amazing pictures of all the love that surrounded us that day

Last dance of the night

It was a day where everything went wrong…. And everything turned out completely right.