How I Planned Your Wedding Read Free Page A

when I looked into her eyes and could see how proud she was of me for becoming the woman I am.
    Of course, in the first half hour of being engaged, visions of wet cats hadn’t even occurred to me yet. Sitting there with my newly minted fiancé, telling him how important it was for me to share our news with my mom immediately, I had this mental image of my mother’s eyes filling with tears as I put on my perfect, white wedding gown for the first time, of her nodding enthusiastically as she crammed her mouth full of lemon-raspberry cake at our menu tasting, of her excitedly begging me to let her throw me four—no, five!—bridal showers.
    So, looking into my glowingly happy face, Dave agreed to allow me one teeny, tiny phone call…to my mother.
    SUSAN
    If you were to look up the phrase mixed feelings in the dictionary, I suspect you would find a picture of a newly engaged girl’s mother. Of course you want your daughter to find someone to love and cherish her, to build a life and a family with her. But the quest for this elusive person is all very theoretical. Her first love was a squishy doll named“Baby Bobby,” which set the bar pretty low. The idea, we hoped, was that she would trade up.
    We used to give nicknames to Elizabeth’s boyfriends. A few I recall are “The Lump,” “The Bottomless Pit” and “The Project.” Some had acronyms: “LAMB” (Little Angry Man Boy) and the unfortunate but accurate “GOAH” (Gayest of All Homosexuals). So as you can imagine, her dad and I had developed a healthy skepticism about her dating choices.
    During her senior year of college, she experienced the ubiquitous “Turkey Dump” when a guy known as “The Cipher,” who was supposed to come home to meet us at Thanksgiving, bailed on her. Hiding a big maternal sigh of relief, I uttered all the soothing mom clichés: “There are plenty of other fish in the sea,” “You need a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and “We’ll always have chocolate.”
    We both agreed that nothing soothes a woman scorned quite like shopping. And thanks to the insane innovation of Facebook, you can shop online for your next boyfriend. She gave me a guided tour of the guys on her college network who had a crush on her. (Note to girls: Until you’ve found Mr. Right, keep your options open.) Initially, I was not encouraged. There were guys with shirts peeled off, guzzling Jägermeister; guys making Zoolander faces, guzzling Jägermeister; guys giving me the thumbs-up sign, guzzling Jägermeister; guys krumping and guzzling Jägermeister…you get the picture. You’ve seen those pictures. Is guzzling Jägermeister today’s prerequisite to romance? Did Mr. Right exist only in my feverish writer’s imagination?
    And then…cue host-of-angels music…she clicked on a picture of Dave. A young, long-haired matinee idol with good grades, good biceps and boyfriend credentials so stellar I was sure he must be hiding something. After all, the guys I write about are made up. “They don’t exist,” I tell my readers.
    She brought him home at Christmas. He was even better in person—confident, charming, humble, tender, honest, funny and completely smitten with the work-in-progress that is my daughter. “He’s too good to be true,” I told her. “He’s not a Project.”
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    SHARING YOUR BIG NEWS WITH THE WORLD
    Dave is an intensely private person (which is why the powers that be have challenged him with a loud-mouthed oversharer of a wife), but he knew that we would have to share the news of our engagement—gushy details and all—with a whole mess of people.
    The weekend he proposed, he scheduled a studio session with a photographer to capture the first blush of our engaged bliss. The engagement portrait is a relatively new phenomenon and from the outside it sometimes seems like an extension of the Hallmarketization of the wedding industry. I mean, really, what couple needs extra professional photos when they’re in the middle of