T-minus 50 Days

There's something amusing to me in the fact that my one post in August was about how September felt near... and suddenly September is upon us! In fact today (5th September) marks 50 days to go.

The reason for the sudden snowballing effect of the passage of time has, I've no doubt, got a lot to do with all the sudden things which have decided to converge with deadlines within the next month or so, all pre-wedding, all requiring urgent attention.

After my last post, we discovered that we would have to move house at the end of our tenancy. Unfortunately, our tenancy was due to expire on the 12th December - approximately 6 weeks after we came back from honeymoon. We hate moving, we hate house hunting. We made the decision to try and move before the wedding, if possible, because otherwise we'd spend our honeymoon and wedding stressing about potentially being homeless if we couldn't find somewhere in time.

What this means, however, is that our timetable for the next two months looks like this:

13th September - Jon's Stag
19th September - Final dress fitting
20th September - RSC Roaring Girl (we saw their production of Middleton's 'A Mad World My Masters' last year and it was amazing so we weren't going to pass up a chance for more Middleton)
27th September - Trip to Leeds for bridesmaid dress fittings
30th September - Jon due to submit thesis (thus making him basically unavailable for packing)
6th October - Get keys to new house and move
7th October - Meeting with photographer
11th October - All family converge for wedding rehearsal
13th October - return keys for old house and house inspection to get deposit back
19th October - Welcome to Night Vale Live (SO EXCITED we got tickets for this)
23rd October - Finish work and go approve cake
24th October - Pre-wedding prep
25th October - Wedding

ahahahahaha that looks really scary all written down like that. I need like 8 extra arms and the ability to stop time in order to get stuff done.

But yes unfortunately this has meant that the comic has started falling behind (later and later each week, le sigh), and that the blog has taken a hit. Mea culpa, guys, mea maxima culpa.

I'm sincerely hoping that the strip won't have to take a hiatus pre-wedding, although I probably won't get a chance to do any comics for whilst we're on honeymoon. This wasn't quite what I had hoped (best laid plans of Mice and Men and all that), but alas that's where we are.  The blog was (you may have noticed) the first to take a hit, and sadly now it is hitting the comic too.


For now, though, things may be a bit patchy. I'll do my best, but I'm afraid life is a bit insane right now.

Chin chin!

DIY Distress

The one problem with deciding to make your own wedding invitations is the part where you realise that you have to send them out. And not just, you know, anonymously posted on the internet - you will be literally sending these things that you have spent months crafting, poured hours and hours of time into constructing, to every person you know and love.

Like that nightmare you had where you did something stupid in front of everyone you know and love.

When this realisation hits you - usually around the time you accidentally glue-gun one of the inserts slightly off-centre into one of the cards, or when you notice that the ink from the stamp has smudged a little around the edges, despite you hairspraying it twice for good measure - your stomach drops and you realise that maybe, maybe those things you've been working on since Christmas are in fact a little bit crap. And everyone knows you're making your own invitations because your mum has been telling everyone so proudly, but actually they're going to open the envelopes and see... these.

And it's too late to back out now because you'd never be able to get professional ones made in time, and of course because everyone knows you're making them yourself, they'll be really confused if they suddenly got non-homemade ones, so you'd have to answer questions about how it all went wrong, so it works out quicker if you just send out this trash and then people will be able to see just went wrong and will hopefully be British enough not to comment on it. Besides, it's not like there's anything you can do to fix it at this point.

Of course from there it starts to spiral.

What if nothing you've made for the wedding is any good? What if it's not just the invitations that suck, what if it all sucks?

And what if it's not just the stuff you made what if all the choices you have made, what if everything you picked for this wedding is going to look awful? What if once it's all put together it just looks like a hot mess of random colours and glue-gunned decorations, and everyone just sits there really awkwardly waiting until there's an appropriate point for them to leave so that they are no longer surrounded by all sorts of weird, poorly-coordinated things.

And then afterwards no-one will speak to you for a while, if ever again, because they've seen what's inside your mind and it wasn't nice for anyone.

And they're probably still all covered in glitter, even though you didn't use any glitter, but that's just the way these things always seem to turn out, with glitter stuck to people.

At this point you have to go and sit quietly somewhere and distract yourself in some non-alarming manner, possibly by watching a livestream of kittens, and take a lot of deep calming breaths.

After that you have to reaffirm yourself, it will be fine, people will like your things, and if they don't they will probably be too drunk to examine them too closely anyway, so it will work out either way.

Appellation Station

So, I alluded to this briefly in one of my earlier posts, as part of the things that are "too hard so I've been putting them off" in my wedding planning, but I am currently wrestling with what my potential surname will be when I'm married.


When I was a kid I blithely announced that I would have to marry someone whose surname began with the same letter as mine (if not my own surname, although this was unlikely as it's a pretty unusual one) so that I could keep my initials the same, because they presently spell out an Italian word and that delights me.

As I got older I figured that naturally I would be changing my name, but obviously that wouldn't be a problem because by the time I got to the age of getting married I would have already accomplished so much under my maiden name, left my stamp on the world with that identity, and would be ready to move on to my new name. I would be a successful author, perhaps, writing under my maiden name so as to allow any potential children some anonymity from my hoardes of screaming fans. So on so forth et cetera.

Naturally, given my stellar understanding of how accomplishment and fame work, I have of course not managed to do any of these things. But lo, here I am, on the brink of marriage (6 months to go next Tuesday) and suddenly having to consider actually changing my name.

Now for the sake of illustration, I will be using the Psuedo-surnames Bulwer and Lytton, which match mine and Jon's surnames in syllables and some assonance.

I've been a Bulwer for nearly 27 years now. I'm used to being a Bulwer. I like it, I think it fits me.

Faced with the prospect of being a Lytton, I instead find myself struggling to part with my identity for a number of reasons, including, but not limited to:


I don't like change.

I don't. It upsets me. I'm still not over the new photocopier they put in at work (well, that is awful,  and thus justified). This was ably demonstrated in my initial freakout when Jon and I got engaged, and my occasional wobbles when I think about getting married, only to calm myself down by reassuring myself that nothing has or will change fundamentally.

Sometimes I'm okay with change - if it is something beyond my control, if it is something that just has to happen, then I can cope and adjust, but if it is something that I have to make an active decision about? I will dither and fret until people either make the decision for me or I have to just close my eyes and pick.



I feel like it is a bit anti-feminist

 You may have noticed that occasionally on this blog I let slip my somewhat feminist leanings. And whilst some people may argue that the act of marriage is in itself anti-feminist, I am of the school of feminism that feels that as long as people are doing something willingly and equally, with a full understanding of it, then if they're not hurting other people they should be free to do it. However, there is something that sticks a little about the idea of totally removing an aspect of my identity for marriage and substituting it for my husband's instead. Whilst I know it isn't the case, it does feel a little bit like a transferral of property, and like I am being subsumed by this new role as wife.

I know this absolutely isn't the case, and I don't at all think this of women who do change their name after marriage, but it is something which is niggling with me a bit - I had an identity prior to marriage, and I'll continue to have an individual identity after marriage. Shouldn't my name reflect that in some way? Why is my name okay to change, but the man's stays the same? I feel like it is betraying my feminist beliefs in some way to do this.

In Jon's defense, he has never pushed that he wants me to change my name, he has even considered changing his so we hyphenate and both have the same name, Bulwer-Lytton. But, as he's a man he's never had to consider changing his name before so it has been a very difficult thing for him to get his head around.


'Lytton' is actually a surname of a very famous pop culture figure

On the bonus it means it will be  much easier to spell to people over the phone. On the downside it limits the names of potential children a little, and means that it feels like a much more common name. Being a Bulwer, I've never met anyone else with the same name. We were the only family of Bulwers in my town, and I think only one of two in our county. I believe it's a more common name in North America, but I have never in my life met a Bulwer I wasn't related to. It felt like being part of an exclusive little club. It's no fault of Jon's that in the last twenty years Lytton has suddenly become such a hugely famous surname internationally, but even aside from that it was a more common name anyway, so even though it's petty it is something which I can't help but note.



Now, hyphenating is definitely an option. Bulwer-Lytton sounds pretty nifty, and is just the correct number of syllables (and he was also a famous Victorian author, btw). But this also raises issues - I wouldn't be able to just use my marriage certificate to change my name, I'd have to use Deed Poll; would my in-laws think that I'm rejecting them in some way; if we have kids and they get the double-barrelled name, will they hate me forever when they are first learning how to write?

etc. etc.


But even then it still feels weird. I guess it's just a case of getting used to it, but until then every time I think of it there's a little part of my brain just going "what's happening why are you calling me that?"

This is all definitely just to do with me over-thinking things to the Nth degree again, as I do. And there's only one thing to do when you are suffering internal turmoil over something very silly.

looming ever closer

Last Wednesday, the 25th, marked 13 months exactly until the wedding.


Last night I had a wedding-related nightmare.

Ugh, I know. I feel ridiculous even saying it. I feel even more ridiculous that it wasn't even my first wedding-related dream, although to be fair the first one was months ago and nowhere near as upsetting. That just involved my slow realisation that my dress was not my dress as I was wearing it, and also forgetting to put my makeup on before leaving the house, so trying to frantically do it in the car outside the church, but discovering I'd left my makeup bag at home.


You may notice a theme, as the dream I had last night involved us - and that's everyone at the wedding - forgetting to go to the reception. That's right. In my dream we got married, and were having a party in this blank, soulless room, and I found myself thinking "Why is the atmosphere so flat? Why is no-one more excited?"

And then I rationalised with myself, in my pragmatic dream way. "It must just be because you've been building it up in your head for so long, expecting it to be this amazing event, and it's to be expected that it isn't going to live up to all that in reality." So I was a little disappointed, but soldiered on.

But! On the drive home, I realised exactly why everything had felt so lame. Somehow all of us - every single person there - had forgotten to go to our reception venue. I got very upset, insisted that we try and go back and actually use the venue. But it was too late, the day was over, and no-one would let us go and do it again. I was somewhat distraught.

I think I must have woken up slightly at this point and gone back to sleep again, because the next thing I knew we were at our actual venue and having an amazing reception, and not only that but they'd laid on this amazing entertainment for us that involved acrobats and clowns and glitter confetti. I think my subconscious was trying to apologise for upsetting me.


But yes, my knowledge of myself and my family has built into me this innate belief that something, something integral will be forgotten and we'll have to turn around to go get it, or we'll realise way too late and just have to carry on. Obviously this has swelled in my mind to express itself in forgetting to even attend the wedding, but that perhaps just demonstrates exactly how sure my subconscious is that I'll forget something on the day, despite my Spreadsheet Of Doom, and despite whatever ghastly checklist I'll set up for myself for the week before. All I can really hope to do is liberally distribute copies of this list to my nearest and dearest and hope that they're paying attention, which is not, in reality, their strong suit when it comes to organising things. I appear to be something of an aberration in my immediate family in terms of my desire to have clear plans well in advance. (okay yes I don't necessarily manage to follow them super well, but that is just another reason for my subconscious to flail until the day arrives).

I can only hope these dreams don't get more frequent, and more involved as we get closer to the date!



Did any of you have wedding nightmares? Did they come true?

12 Months Served

So, yesterday marked 1 year since Jon proposed to me. I'm a little shocked by how quickly it's gone, which I'm fully aware sounds trite and cliched, but in my defence, we did move house over the Summer, so that basically knocked about three months straight out of the Calendar.

Of course, when I say 'yesterday', I actually mean Sunday 15th, which from where I'm sitting as I'm writing now (Wednesday 11th) is four days away. I'm telling you this, and thus removing the air of mystery from my blog posts, because I know I'm going to get my timelines all muddled up at some point, so I figured full disclosure from the outset was probably best.

(I've also been up since 4:30am to drop Jon at the airport, and so I've been up for like 5 hours and it's not even 10am, and I've been in work for three hours, except I couldn't get into the building until 7:00am so I sat in the car park for an hour before that, and I hurt my foot opening a door like an hour and a half ago and it's still sore, so this might not be very coherent at all. But let's just have fun with it.)

Now, I spend a lot of time skulking around over on the forums at Weddingbee, which are nice and active. (I actually found them because Jon spent time lurking on there trying to get tips on engagement rings in the run up to our engagement - ever the academic, putting hours of research in!) There is a huge subsection of this forum dedicated to people who are 'waiting' to be engaged. This is not a concept that I had ever come across prior to Weddingbee, and I will admit I'm still not sure on what people mean when they say they've been "waiting for x number of years". Is that how long it's been since they and their partner talked about getting married one day? Or is it the length of the whole relationship? And if it's the length of the whole relationship, does that mean that they've literally been waiting for their partner to propose since their first date? What about just enjoying the relationship? Does it not count in its own right? Is it literally all about getting married?

I'd rather hoped society had moved past the idea that all women need is a husband, doesn't matter who, by now. And that relationships were all equally valid whether they were legally certified or not, so 'waiting' was a redundant concept, that was demeaning to both parties involved, and seemed to be tragically reminiscent of eras long gone.


But I'm getting off-topic. My point is that I wasn't one of those girls who was constantly expecting a proposal. In fact, to say that the proposal was unexpected feels too mild, too understated to describe exactly the state of mind I was in when it happened. I was so set and comfortable in my life and relationship as was, and I don't take surprises very well at all, so my reaction was definitely less-than-dignified.

 

Fortunately Jon knows me well enough not to take my reactions personally, and also to know that I am easily distracted by shiny things so the beautiful ring he chose helped very much to take my mind off my anxieties from time-to-time.

Because by god I was anxious. I'd had this sudden change in status thrust upon me with no preparation, no warning! Jon had been planning for months, he had some idea, but me? I was entirely passive in this situation - a victim of a drive-by proposing! Shell-shocked and unbalanced, and utterly panicked.

How can I explain it? There were multiple issues at play. Firstly anxieties about this sudden 'change' in our relationship. It was silly because I knew I was committed to this man and had no desire to leave him, but suddenly getting a ring made it all seem very official and public. Another cause of anxiety was that I dreaded people commenting on it - I wasn't expecting bad comments at all, but we've kept our relationship very low-key and downplay it a lot. We're totally different people in private, honestly we're obnoxious, but in public we're much more reserved - which is how I think it should be! The private parts of my relationship are like my underwear: essential, always there, supportive and something that I'll invest in, but just as I'll never be comfortable showing my lovely matching bra-and-knickers off in public, the idea of making this part of our relationship public property for however long it took for the excitement to blow over made me want to squirm. Whilst I'm certain I'd probably get some compliments on my underwear (set I'm wearing provided - I have, if I may say so, excellent taste, but not necessarily the money to indulge it), I'm not about to run it up the flagpole and see who salutes; so knowing that we'd only get good reactions to our engagement didn't make me any keener to shout it from the rooftops.

Another issue was perhaps this inbuilt fear of aging and that getting married required a level of maturity I did not possess. The 'reasons I'm not mature enough to get married' strips are only the tip of the iceberg. Marriage has always felt like a 'some time in the future' sort of thing, when I felt like I'd achieved the fabled status of 'Grown Up'. I still feel like I don't know what's happening half the time. I struggle to keep on top of my laundry. I like pick-and-mix way too much, and I get frustrated at museums when little kids hog all the interactive displays and I can't have a go. Jon can always tell when I've been watching TV during the day because he comes home and it's set to a cartoon channel. I got annoyed when kids pushed in front of me in the queue at Disneyland so I didn't get to meet Belle, because when I got to the front of the queue they swapped her out for Beast - if I have to queue, why don't they? (I'm also compiling a lengthy list on why I'm not mature enough to ever reproduce, but we'll get to that later)

 But also the terrifying thing about 'some day' becoming 'today' means that all the things that previously followed 'some day' in a vague way are now in front of me in an inevitable timeline that has made me staggeringly aware of my own mortality and how quick life disappears in front of us, something which I had been comfortably denying to myself for years. Basically, now I'm going to grow old and die and it's all Jon's fault.

Part of my motivation for starting The W Word in the first place was because I felt frustrated that in the midst of this anxiety, all I could find were posts about how wonderful and amazing it was to be engaged (which yes, it is nice) and women who were giddy and happy and laughed and shrieked and danced. Not women who swore and got drunk and hid their ring in their bag when they first went back to work after the proposal because they didn't want people to see and say something. I know there are other girls out there who have felt engagement anxiety and GUYS: YOU'RE NOT ALONE. Wedding culture can easily make anyone with doubts and nerves feel like an alien or an outsider (unless you're a man, in which case it seems to be expected and nigh on encouraged) I wanted to do this post because I'd felt a bit like my initial reason for this had been lost in the year since the engagement, because my anxieties about being engaged have settled, but my motivation was to help other people facing this.


I perhaps didn't deal with my anxieties in the healthiest way. I acknowledged them, and then I forced myself to push out of my comfort zone, anxieties be damned. Like tearing off a plaster. What helped though was the realisation that nothing had changed between Jon and I. We didn't have to start treating each other differently, we didn't magically feel different because suddenly I had some bling. Nor, fundamentally, did my relationship with the world at large change. And continuity is a lovely calming thing.

Now, I know myself, and I know that the closer we get to the big day the more likely I am to have a bit of an anxiety flare-up. And not in a cute, demure blushing bride sort of way. More like in a climbing out of the bathroom window and running for the hills sort of way.

But I'm talking about it - and talking helps, even if I'm just cracking jokes. Because that means I'm not just bottling it all up and letting the pressure build and build until I pop.


This post ended up in a totally different place from what I had initially, vaguely planned in my sleep-deprived brain.

Did anyone else suffer from Engagement Anxiety? If you have, how did you overcome it? Have you overcome it yet? This is a safe space!

Slow it down, read the sign, so you know just where you're going...!

Apparently one of my two major referrers to the blog is thetaoofbadass.pw  I can't seem to make the return link work, but a bit of googling brings this website up. So. Hello to all you Badass Taoists. If any one of you could tell me how/why/where this is linked on the site, I'd be delighted to know because honestly I can't work out the connection. I really can't.

Aaaannyyway. Back to the point of this post, ably introduced with the immortal words of the Spice Girls - planning too early. Is there such a thing?



One of the problems of having an engagement that is more than twice the length of a Blue Whale's gestation period* is that you are faced with two options. 1) You spend the first chunk of that time just 'enjoying being engaged' until you reach the Average Engagement Threshold (in the UK, this is about 18 months); or 2) you decide that actually you are now about to single-handedly plan the biggest event you will probably ever plan in your life, and maybe you should make the most of your very large window so that you don't get stressed closer to the time.


Well, if you are like me and have been with your boyfriend for 7 years and lived together for 4 years, being engaged is very similar to not being engaged. In fact, I would personally go as far as to say that the two states of being are nigh-on identical. So I decided to follow the latter course of action, and Maximise My Time. Whilst academically I know that a wedding can be planned to everyone's satisfaction in a fairly short length of time, Don't Tell The Bride has frequently shown that such a course of action can reduce even grown men to tears.

And I am, despite all evidence to the contrary, a planner. I like knowing things are sorted, and having a buffer of time to fix things should anything go wrong, as well as plenty of time to mull over things at my leisure without feeling pressured by time constraints. So I began to gather my tools.

I also bought one of those silly planning books, you know the kind, like a giant filofax with flowers on. It wasn't super helpful in terms of planning, because it was a) too big to carry around with me, and b) silly to believe that I'd taken time out from researching on the internet to then write things down by hand in my book. Also the timeline was again based on having a maximum 18-month engagement. It did however have lots of handy pockets, which I have been stuffing all my receipts in, and it has some squared pages for doing table plans, which may well be useful later.



But the comment I keep hearing from family, and even Jon, is that they're worried we won't have enough to do next year. That by doing things early we miss out on the fun.

I'm not quite sure why what I'm doing right now only qualifies as 'fun' if it is done with fewer than 12 months to the wedding and not now, but I've never planned a wedding before, what do I know? But, we are now under 14 months from the wedding, and as we approach the 12 month mark I'm starting to get more anxious about just Getting Stuff Done. Things that aren't done are things that are still left to panic about, things that could potentially be more difficult to sort out than expected.

To prove to certain interested parties - mainly my Mother - that I wasn't rushing things, and was instead being Organised, as there were things that couldn't actually be done until closer to the wedding, I made a month-by-month plan of things to do in the next year. And it was all going okay until we hit August, and then things started getting busy. Really busy. So I started shunting things around a bit and basically from next April we're going to need to get a lot of things done month-by-month. We have a bit of a break in June, but otherwise it's busy. But apparently having lots of busy things to do made people feel better that I wasn't depriving Future!Me of some exciting planning funtimes, which is totally worth giving Present!Me anxiety flashes because there are things that need doing but I'm powerless to do them. It's like constantly knowing there was something REALLY IMPORTANT that you had to do, but you know you've forgotten to do it and can't work out what it was. That's what it's like. 

But now, what I'm seeing is a GIANT to-do list, with things on it that I can get done now, like right now, with no major issues, and that would be things off my list. And I'm chomping at the bit to do them, because honestly I learnt my lesson after doing my first all-nighter at University. Leaving things to the last minute DOES suck, it IS much better to get things done early if you can.

And also once I have ticked things off, I can feel suitably smug and pleased with myself, the warm glow of having accomplished something productive, and then focus on my other interests until it fades and the whole vicious cycle starts again.

*Alternatives for measuring the length of my engagment:

• 1.89 Rhinos or Camels
• 89.5 domestic Cats (based on a 4-kitten litter size)
• 1.66 Sperm Whales
• 1.83 Giraffes
• 7.2 Tigers.
• 1 and 3/4 Orcas
• 1 Elephant that's about a month overdue.
• 2/3 of a Black Alpine Salamander, depending how far up the hill it lives
• 59% of a Frilled Shark (but a whole spiny dogfish shark!)

 I don't know why I like to measure things by animal gestation periods, but I find it very fascinating.



How long an engagement did you have? Were you a planner or did you wait it out? Tips and tricks?

Bonjourno!

When I got engaged, I had a mini-meltdown.

I loved my boyfriend with everything I had - even though he can be grumpy, puts his dirty shirts in the clean washing pile, and seems to keep beer bottle caps for sentimental reasons - and whilst I still can't quite get my tiny mortal brain around the concept of 'forever', I didn't want to go anywhere. But ENGAGEMENT and MARRIAGE were big weighty words, and I'm not good with big weighty concepts unless they somehow involve giant cakes.

I was suffering from 'Engagement Anxiety'. The idea of my status suddenly and unexpectedly (REALLY unexpectedly) being upgraded scared me! I didn't like saying, or even writing the word 'engaged', and did everything I could to avoid it. The fear was not quite overwhelming, but certainly staggering. It made me queasy and I wanted to just hide away and not be me. But the reasons behind it were so inexpressible and intangible. I couldn't say why I was scared and anxious, only that I was. It wasn't to do with Jon, or with getting married - of course we'd talked about it, and as far as we were concerned, we'd been 'unofficially' engaged for a while, waiting for the right time and so on.
I tried to explain my feelings to my Mum, but she didn't understand it.
"Well, you want to marry him don't you?"

"Yes, but that's not it. It's just... a BIG thing."

"Oh don't be silly."

So I turned to the internet for advice. That proved about as helpful as a chocolate teapot. Lots of articles discussing the phenomenon, but the level of help offered was along the lines of:  "You're questioning how much you love him" (no I'm not) and "What will make you feel better is having a bachelorette party" (no it won't) etc etc.

I felt a bit disconnected from all the bridal stuff out there. It was either for girls who had been planning their dream wedding since they were kids, or it was so alternative it would cause little old ladies to follow you into the reception hall and ask if it was a real wedding or just pretend (actually happened at my friend's wedding). I'm very average. Middle-of-the-road. Almost cripplingly pragmatic (there isn't much soaring romance in my soul), and I tend to make obtuse connections in my brain. There wasn't anything out there that really wholly suited me, that expressed what I wanted to express, and that didn't at least once make me raise my eyebrows and wonder what they meant.

So I decided to make it for myself. And then, because the internet makes Attention Whores of us all, I published it online.

I hope you like it.