There goes the bride

Well another interlude in our life is over.  It was a surreal kind of weekend holed up in 5 star luxury at the hotel where the nuptials took place surrounded by family and friends - some old, but many new.  Now back at home, for the past couple of days we have been in a strange kind of ennui as we contemplated all that had gone on and began picking up the threads of our usual existence.

Weddings, it seems, are a never-ending, sausage-machine business.  At the Brisbane riverside hotel venue our daughter chose, we discovered that she was one of 5 or 6 brides last weekend.   In the lobby and from the window of our room we were able to get a bird's eye view of the wedding groups who went before her - all more-or-less indistinguishable apart from the colours that the statutory three bridesmaids wore - one lot in pink, another in pale green and even one in black, for-goodness-sake.  Twittering clumps of over-dressed guests were obvious in the lobby and courtyards, and from time to time another white stretch-limousine glided through the portico.  Agile, black-clad photographers darted back and forth herding their respective quarries into the pre-set, obligatory spots for shoots.  Their hyped-up, jovial bevies were first fanned across the sweeping staircase, then swept outside to be draped beside the fountain and finally jostled off to be shot in a casual cluster on the landing beside the water.

All so contrived.  At times it seemed that all the photography had overtaken the event itself, and I thought about the awful unnecessary expense it was when so many guests were busy catching candid digital shots that would have far more popular appeal.  I also thought about the magnificent white padded album of a niece's wedding photos that we only got to see when her mother pulled it down from a top shelf long after the couple had gone their separate ways.  And the other neice who still had the debt for her video-taped Cinderella wedding to pay off after her marriage, also, was over.

Notwithstanding, our wedding went off without a hitch; it was a joyful time and everything turned out just as our CM had wanted.  She is now formally attached to another family we hardly know, and gradually she will become more one of them than of us.  But as far as we can see, they are a true-blue, solid, close-knit family who are ready to love her as much as we do.  We are confident that she and her fine young man will make a go of it, and that is all we can ask.

Comments

[Jean]

I love your honesty. So good to see someone admitting that however much you love the bride this cannot make you love the event if it's not your kind of thing. I was at a wedding on Easter Saturday and had most of the feelings you describe, whilst being delighted for the couple, who just beam at one other all the time and whom I had a hand in introducing to each other. How much more challenging when it's your daughter. I don't see, though, why she would become 'more one of them than one of us'. Maybe the wedding being not really your cup of tea (not herbal?) was a little conducive to undue pessimism, joy notwithstanding?

[Jude]

Thanks, Jean, for trying to hear what I was saying. You are right; I don't really think we will lose our daughter to the in-laws. It's just that she is now living among them and it's far away from us. Moreover, she has abandoned our name for theirs! When I married I wasn't game to buck convention and keep my own surname, but I had always secretly hoped that my daughters might. My consolation is that both my girls have become attached to other families of good-living people and doing their bit for cultural cross-fertilisation. Both e-mail me several times a week, and there are lots of shorthand text messages from their phones in between.