The day started with an email from the owner of the venue we’d picked for our wedding party laconically informing me that he had to postpone tonight’s meeting to an hour later because he had a “setback” (the email contained quite a few spelling mistakes and zero punctuation), without bothering to say “sorry”. It’s only an hour later, but it messes up our whole day’s organization, which was already pretty tight as it was, and I’m not a big fan of the practice of notifying people on the same day and by email, but hey, maybe I’m picky. Since he didn’t say “hello” or “best” or anything, I just replied with an “ok”, which is probably the most passive-aggressive email I’ve ever sent in my life. I’ll be extra nice to someone else later today to make up for it.
Sure, we could have rescheduled, but since the option on the venue only lasts two weeks (and it’s week two), we were a little stuck. There aren’t a lot of small wedding venues around, so we’ll see tonight.
As far as the dress is concerned, it’s been a bit of a struggle. So far, I’ve spotted exactly ONE dress that I like, out of the thousands (seriously, thousands!) of dresses I’ve seen on a good hundred sites. I don’t like anything else: too much cleavage, too transparent, too much glitter, too much lace, cuts that only fit anorexic models under the age of sixteen, and so on. I love this one, it’s simple, a bit bohemian, a bit romantic, perfect, really. And it’s not expensive either.
It’s not that I’m cheap (I mean, not really), but Jon and I never wanted a big wedding that would eat up all our savings as if we didn’t have a whole lifetime to live together after. We have always wanted a small, simple wedding with just our loved ones, a brief civil ceremony, a nice little meal and some dancing. Nothing extravagant, just a way to mark our commitment to each other without jeopardising our future. I don’t judge couples who prefer a lavish wedding; to each their own — but it’s just not our thing. So it wouldn’t make much sense to spend a lot of money on a dress that I’m only going to wear once, especially if it’s going to be all the things I don’t like.
Back to the perfect dress, then. The one I fell in love with. The thing is that they only sell it online, and the problem is this: on the Belgian branch of the site, it only exists in sizes 2 and 4 . No problem, I look on the French site: same thing. In fact, it’s the same for all of Europe. My size exists on the American website, but inevitably, the platform forces a redirection to the site corresponding to the country of residence and it is impossible to have anything delivered from another country. There’s a size above mine on the UK site, which might work because then I’d just have to use my girlfriend privileges with Amandine who offered to help me resize it thanks to her ninja sewing skills. By the time I thought about it, and considered asking my other friend Mary who lives in England if I could have the dress delivered to her house, my size had disappeared from the site.
So I contacted the site to try to find a solution which would consist in having the dress delivered from one country to the other. However, as we have resolutely entered the terminal phase of capitalism for some time now, which translates to (1) the total impossibility of talking to a real human being and (2) a complete lack of interest on the part of companies in minimally satisfying their potential customers, since they’ll end up selling everything anyway, I come to the logical conclusion that I can get stuffed when the call centre person explains that all I have to do is set up an alert to be informed about the stocks. Because obviously I’m an idiot who didn’t do that a month ago and doesn’t check every day, overwhelmed by the growing frustration of seeing that nothing has changed since.
I don’t feel like the whole dress situation is going to get resolved any time soon, so it’s best to leave it to the universe and move on, although it’s still in the back of my mind and I’m starting to think I’m going to get married in jeans/sweatshirt/sneakers if this keeps up (it will save us money, I guess).
To top it all off, our wedding rings, made in Ireland, are out there somewhere, and we don’t really know where because the tracking number doesn’t track anything. I contacted the jeweller this morning, to no avail so far; again, we’ll have to wait for things to sort themselves out, I suppose. At least I’m glad we didn’t go for the €2000/piece wedding rings, otherwise, I’d probably be hyperventilating in a paper bag as I write this.
I shouldn’t care about any of this. It’s not in my nature to worry about things I have no influence on. But I think that approaching a fork in the road like this, symbolic as it is (after all, Jon and I have been a couple for thirteen years), brings me back to the absence of my mum, how I wish she was here with me, and how much I miss her. I have a brilliant support crew though. My godmother offered to help me the second I told her about the wedding, I have wonderful friends who are fantastically supportive, a dad who does his best, and a fiancé who holds my hand every step of the way, but nothing can fill the void: that’s what mourning is, a continuous process of adjusting to the reality around a space that nothing and no one can fill. Some days that space is smaller, and on others, it takes over everything.
My mum was very fond of Jon. She adopted him as if he had always been there, and they had a lot in common. I’m glad she knew him, and I am glad to share my life with someone who understands what I’m talking about when I talk about her and the loss she left behind. But still… the absence is hard, and as time goes by and new situations arise in my life, I find it harder and harder to imagine what she would have said, what advice she would have given me, and how she would have helped me, with one of her jokes, to put things into perspective.