*Giggle*

Me: "Sooooo we're thinking of having a Firefly-themed wedding reception."
My mother: *Long pause* "Does that mean I get to wear red cowboy boots?"

Guess I don't have to worry about scandalizing my family with my non-traditional ideas. Well, not my mother, at any rate. 

A nod to tradition. Kinda.

When we were first discussing getting engaged, Nate and I had a conversation about names. He said he didn't care what I did with mine (he'd already had a woman change her name to his, and clearly that didn't turn out well), but he didn't really want to change his.

Nate's last name isn't the one he was born with--he was legally adopted by his stepfather in high school, and had spent a couple of years before that going by a hyphenated version of his biological father's last name and his stepfather's last name, which his mother had taken when they married. Like a lot of Nate's family history, his name is simple on the surface with complicated underpinnings. He loves his stepfather, he likes his last name, and he wants to hang onto it, so the option of both of us changing our last names to a mutual one is off the table.

I'm fine with that. My main concern at the time was that he didn't have strong feelings about what I did with mine, because I had already pretty much made up my mind.

I'm keeping my last name. It's something I've planned on doing even before Nate and I got together, and there's an added bonus that I don't really like the way my last name sounds with his anyway... but you know, even if he had an awesome last name like "Bonesaw" or "Runswithwolves" or something, I'd still probably hang onto my birth name.

It's always something I've been pretty certain of, I think in large part because my mom kept her last name when she married my dad (they were both married and divorced from other people before they met and married each other and had me and my brother). My brother and I both have our dad's last name, and our mom's birth name as our middle name.

When I was little, I would go through the school phone books we got every year and look at my classmates' parents' names. Whenever I saw a woman whose last name was different than her husbands, I felt a shivery sense of pride--like those women, and my mother, were making statements about themselves just by ignoring tradition and doing what they wanted.

I asked once my mom why she had kept her birth name when she married my dad, and she said she'd changed her name for her first marriage, reverted to her birth name after the divorce, and didn't feel like changing it a second time. That, and she didn't like the way her first name sounded with my dad's last name. For her, it was that simple--her commitment had nothing to do with what name was on her driver's license, so why not hang onto the one she liked?

I've always liked the symbolism of keeping my last name--expressing that, like my husband, I'll still be an individual and independent person as well as a committed partner. It makes me feel strong. The fact that doing so also honors my mother and the choices she made makes me extra happy, because my mom is awesome.

And it gives a snarky explanation to anyone who demands to know why I'd keep my last name: "Because it's tradition!"

On a lighter note...

Today's wedding theme idea: "But will it blend?"

Also, Nate and I were walking back from the car yesterday from fencing practice and both our hands were full, so we linked arms. After a couple steps, Nate looked down at me and said "Remember--keep God in the middle." 

A Good Wife! A Good Wife! A Good Wife! Like You Wanted!

So I had me a realization on Saturday.

Wedding thought of the day

Slightly Firefly themed wedding.

Geeky, yes. Also awesome. Also, if there's anything that I like at all in the current "vintage" trend that seems to be sweeping the wedding/decor/fashion world, it's a grungy old-world Western kind of look. :) All the other vintage stuff kind of drives me crazy, but if we rocked the Firefly stuff, I could wear something like this:

This moment of vanity and geekery brought to you by a slow day at work.

Transmission ends.

Okay, I follow a couple different wedding blogs. Offbeat Bride is my favorite (see the badge in the sidebar), but I also dabble in A Practical Wedding. A lot of the time, their posts have too much emotional handwringing for me, but every once in awhile (especially when the woman who runs the blog, Meg, writes something) I read something that either really hits home or really sums up my own experience.

Today's post is one of those.

I sympathize so strongly with the feelings of fear, despair, and hopelessness that Meg writes about as she works a soulless job and her husband tries and fails over and over to find a job in an economy that's spiraling out of control around them. Graduating college into a recession and spending my first year and a half as an independent adult supporting two has changed how I think about money, how I think about work, and how I think about myself. For better and for worse. I hope the better sticks and the worse fades.

And I glad our story, like Meg's, has so far had a happy ending.

Um.

So people talk about weird shit when you mention being engaged.

Nate and I are in St. Paul's Episcopal church, picking up our weekly CSA box, and we meet up with a coworker of mine, Bill. He manages the organic farm where the CSA food is grown and is basically a priest-in-training at the church. He's a very chill, laid back kind of guy, and the church is very liberal, so I actually enjoy talking with him about his faith and the process of learning to be a priest.

So we're there in the church hall, chatting with Bill, and in comes a small, brown-haired woman who was probably in her mid-forties. She and Bill hug, Bill introduces me and Nate as CSA subscribers and mentions that we're recently engaged.

"Oh, really?" she beams up at us. "Okay, one word of advice from an old married person?" And here she steps back and looks at each of us. "There's you? And there's you. And?" She looks up at the roof of the hall. "There's God."

She points at each of us and up at the ceiling, then roughly sketches the sign of the cross. "You here? And God in the middle. You just leave room between you. For God."

Nate and I looked at each other. We're all for God and all, but probably in a different way than she imagined. We finally said "Uh, yeah! Will do!"

When we got home, Nate suggested we keep communication between us instead.

I'd hit that.

Thinkin' thinkin' thinkin'. 

Clothes make the man

So every time I ask Nate what he wants to wear for the wedding, he says "Top hat and tails."

Now, it's an accomplishment in and of itself for Nate to have an opinion about what he's wearing--his default setting is "shirtless with flannel jammie pants." His outlook on life is pretty casual in general, so I was surprised to hear that he had an opinion at all about what he would be wearing... but I wasn't really surprised to hear he wanted to wear something fancy-pants.

Nate likes to dress up, likes to look nice (good little Leo!), and generally completely subverts the stereotypes about how men never ever give a shit about what they're wearing and have to be shoehorned into their formalwear by the long-suffering women who deign to put up with them. That's one of the ways we completely upset the gender stereotype--he loves to dress up and I always feel awkward or uncomfortable. So when he says he wants to wear black tie formalwear, I get a ball of nausea and ice in my stomach--that's so not me.

But, you know, it's not my wedding, dammit, it's our wedding, so if he wants to dress up all fancy, we'll make it work. There had to be a way to coordinate my laid-back hippie beach wedding dress idea with Nate's penguin cosplay. Right?

So I got to thinking. And it occurred to me that associating a top hat and tails with black tie attire is a very modern convention--it's about as formal as men's formalwear gets. But roll the clock back a couple of hundred years, and tailcoats and hats on dudes were worn in much more casual situations. What if Nate rocked a tailcoat with a sort of archival, costumey quality?

Enter the Edwardian tailcoat.

If we designed something for Nate that was kind of evocative of Colin Firth's costumes in the A&E (six hour marathon) Pride and Prejudice, only hopefully without the terrifyingly crotching high-waisted pants, and made it in a color, rather than just black, that might work. I wouldn't want to do a perfectly period design, but I'd want to distance it somehow from modern tailcoats. I'm hoping to do something tea-length and not-too-fancy myself (with a dash of color or two), so I think we might have found a workable compromise.

Nate and I have begun tackling the first logistical nightmare of our wedding planning adventure--the engagement party.

Mangagement ring!

So Nate and I went out to dinner last Thursday night (burger and martini night at the Sidecar, woo!) and I popped the question.