When I think back on the nine months I spent planning my wedding, I remember making a series of odd choices. I took my veil off after the ceremony to put on a flower crown, even though I’ve never been to a single music festival, don’t own cowboy boots, and never had a boho chic phase. I invited people who I don’t know anymore; who I’m not even sure I really knew then. The strapless dress I chose to walk down the aisle in was not weather or seasonally appropriate. (It was October in Indianapolis.)
But more memorable than any of that were the fights I had with my mom. Somehow, talking about my wedding with her had an unbelievable ability to turn me into the worst version of myself: 15 years old, hormonal, unhinged, and a little bit of a bitch. One perfectly reasonable question about location details, menu, or floral arrangements sent me right back to the worst phase of my adolescence—the one where I was almost always about to slam my bedroom door with such intensity it shook the house, my heart adrenalized with an irrational hatred.
To be fair, my mother’s shadow self also emerged while wedding planning, and it was more than a fragile young bride could handle. One day, my calligrapher called me at the office, to ask where to send the 30 extra emergency wedding invitations. “Sorry to bother you at work,” he said. “But where do you want these thirty new invites sent?” He trailed off, waiting for me to speak. I’d been momentarily perplexed—spinning my office phone cord around my manicured finger—I painted my nails ballet slipper pink with neurotic regularity for about a year after my husband proposed, a habit I had uncritically embraced but would soon abandon—my brain slow to catch on to what was really happening. Then it hit me, like a catering truck gone out of control down an icy hill, slamming into a reception tent: my mother had ordered them.
I gritted my teeth, imagining 30 unapproved guests—strangers she’d met at a neighbor’s Christmas party, or someone in her book club, and their plus-ones—at the intimate ceremony I’d been imagining since…well, not since I was a kid (I wasn’t that brainwashed by Disney), but definitely since other people I knew had weddings that seemed fabulous and I’d started wanting a party for myself. As I saw it then, the gall she had, the lack of boundaries, the lapse in communication. It made my blood boil up into my brain and turned me into a sobbing, ridiculous teenager.
I hung up with the calligrapher as politely and quickly as possible and called my mother to psycho-whisper about how everything was ruined and it was all her fault. This was one example of how I spent nine months of wedding planning with some unidentified pubescent hormone surging through my veins, exploding behind my eyes right at the place where my tear ducts operated, and then feeling the inevitable wave of guilt and sadness and embarrassment, resulting in a call back to my mom 20 minutes later to apologize weepily and ask her opinion on all the meaningless stuff I couldn’t figure out on my own.
I could spend a lot of time regretting the flower crown and the dress and the weird guests I barely knew, but at the time, all of that made me happy. I could regret being mad about the secret wedding invites my mom ordered—though I don’t actually remember how many of them were sent out, or even how many people showed up to the blessed event in general. I could even regret all the ways in which I was the absolute worst to the lady who birthed me and fed me and taught me how to stand up for myself. But what I mostly regret was the frame of mind that allowed me to get so worked up about an event meant to be a sacred celebration in the first place: the idea that this was the most important party I’d ever, ever have, and that anyone would ever go to.
The truth is, if you play your cards right, you will have many wonderful things to celebrate in your life. There will be personal triumphs and landmark events and you will get to have lots of parties to commemorate them. Your wedding doesn’t need to incorporate every idea you’ve ever had, every trend you can find on the internet, and every dollar you can almost afford to spend. Save something for your divorce blowout, your alcohol and magic mushroom-laced post-birth rave, the jamboree when you find out the ex-boyfriend who ghosted you has premature balding and adult acne. The biggest regret I have from my wedding is taking it all—and mostly myself—too damn seriously. Your entire life gets to be a party when you stop doing that.