Wringing my hands about wedding rings (ooh, I punned!)-- Part Deux

So when last we left our heroine (me), I had given some cashola to the jeweler I lurved in Ventura as a promissory payment on a custom ring... of some kind. I was torn about teal-blue diamonds vs. sapphires and feeling kind of guilty about spending so much money on such a frivolous thing and debating the moral implications of buying diamonds, even ethically sourced ones, and generally wringing my emotional hands about the whole situation.

So I got a call from the jeweler yesterday, and he told me he had ordered some diamonds for me to look over, but the color variations weren't as diverse as he thought I would like. I went in to take a look this morning, and he was right. I was hoping for a five-stone ring that had a very light stone, a medium-colored stone, a dark stone, a medium-colored stone, and a very light stone in a line, but when we put the diamonds next to each other, they all looked like pretty much the same shade of teal. Teal's my favorite color, and the stones were beautiful, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

So long story short, I looked at the sapphire ring again, I looked at the diamonds, I mixed up the order of the stones, and finally George (the jeweler) suggested we put a couple of sky-blue diamonds on the ends of the line of teal stones. I took out the two middle stones, bumped the lightest color teal stones into the second and fourth positions, and put two sky-colored stones on the end, and voila--colors I loved, the gradations I wanted, and stones I didn't have to worry would wear out in fifteen years, like sapphires can. Sold.

Until recently, I'd been wrestling with buying a diamond wedding ring. I trusted the jeweler when he said the diamonds were ethically sourced, but I felt guilty about spending what, to me, is a good amount of money on a purely symbolic item. I felt like diamonds are so stereotypically decadent and chi-chi, would I really be happy with a diamond ring, or would I look at it and think I could have had something almost as pretty without the pricetag? Would I feel guilty about spending money other folks didn't have on something that was, on some level, a status symbol?

So I was driving to work on Thursday and it occurred to me--I'm paying for this ring by myself, with money I earned. Doing so isn't going to keep me from paying my bills or put me in debt. Nate's not helping me with it. My family isn't helping me with it. I'm choosing to spend money I earned with my own work on this.

All of a sudden, the ring changed from a petty concession to capitalism (and my fixation on sparkly things) to a symbol of my independence and capability. I'm spending money I earned on this ring, money I worked for. It's not an indulgence or a stereotype, it's a token of achievement. It's a symbol of my ability to take care of myself, to commit myself to a marriage as an independent adult.

That doesn't suck. :)

Pre-weddin' depression?

Things are not necessarily well in Sarahville.

This Sunday we went up to Santa Barbara and looked at the SB Unitarian Church as a venue. It was probably a little small for our needs, but it was really beautiful. The whole building is sort of a Spanish mission-style building. I'm uncomfortable getting married in any church, even an awesome one like the UU church, but we could have the ceremony in the courtyard outside, where there's a nice fountain and lots of green grass. If we don't book the parish hall, I think we'd save some money, too (that's the 'chapel' where they have lots of ceremonies and weekly services, and is this big dark long room that has a very Catholic church feel to it and kind of creeps me out--fine if that's your thing, but my spirituality eschews indoor worship and clergy standing up dictating God's opinion to people, so I'd feel completely dishonest being married in a place that made me so uncomfortable).

I didn't exactly fall in love with it immediately in a "OMG THIS IS IT!!!!!" kind of way, but as we walked through the grounds I started scheming and imagining and the place really grew on me. I could imagine decor, and in my head I started arranging furniture, and I started getting really excited, so when we left and Nate said he thought the place was too small for our estimated headcount, I got really bummed.

I think part of the reason venue shopping is stressing me out so much is because I think it's one of the aspects of planning that's the most critical and has the possibility of being the most restrictive. It's hard to avoid the big wedding-in-a-box places around here, and I have a really hard time visualizing decorations and colors and whatnot without a space to work in--that's just not how my brain works. I feel like we're sort of stuck until we have a venue, then a lot of my questions will be answered for me and I can start the more fun parts of planning because I have some of the bigger nitty-gritty stuff cleared away.

Nate keeps telling me that it's too early to stress myself out, but I have a tendency to leave things for the last minute, and that's the last thing I want to do with the wedding. I don't want the whole process to be a nightmare, but I'm worried that if I don't stress out now, it's just not going to get done. :( I know to a certain extent perspective is a choice--I could choose to be stressed out about something or I could choose to go with the flow, but I can't seem to let go and let wedding stuff just happen, or even to approach the planning I am doing with enthusiasm and a joyful heart. Maybe it's too personal, maybe I've heard too many horror stories, maybe I feel like if I want shit to be important and meaningful I have to break my back to get it. I'm not sure what the source of my perspective is right now, but I'm not thrilled with it.

Dolphins again

Last Friday, Nate and I collected a local friend, went down to a beach, and had a handfasting. 

This was one of those things I knew wanted to do even before we got engaged. There isn't a lot of tradition I'd consider part of my cultural heritage, but pre-Christian Celtic traditions have always rung true for me, just like I find myself drawn to the deities my ancestors probably worshiped in my own spiritual practice.

As I got into wedding planning and began to be confronted head-on with what before had been solely a conceptual understanding of how much inanity and demeaning tradition goes into planning a Western wedding, I wanted to do a handfasting more and more. Back in the day, before the Church took over marriage and then capitalism took over the celebration, this was what they did. This was all they had, all they needed. Marriages worked for a year and a day, or for a few years, or forever, or not at all. 

We dressed up fancy and drove out to Spinnaker. The song our friends had their first dance to came up on the iPod, which I took as a good sign. The next song was "Bad Romance," and I decided not to take it as any kind of sign at all. We stood on the beach together. We debated whether we should call animal control about the sea lion flopping listlessly around on the warm sand. We watched another pair of dolphins slicing through the waves. We sipped beer and ate a spice cake I'd baked that afternoon, and our friend tied our hands together with the cords Nate made--three colors for him, three colors for me, one thick ribbon to symbolize our commitment, seven strands in total. 

We exchanged vows, which we'd kept private before we spoke them (which caused my control freak brain no end of nervousness). Mine were very direct and legalistic, but also lighthearted ("...to support you; to laugh with you (and occasionally at you); to have epic slow-motion fistfights with you as a means of settling our differences...") , and his were more of a recollection of where our relationship had come from, what we had gone through, and where we were going now. Unplanned, I promised to have very serious conversations with him while slow-dancing around the living room, and he promised to always slow-dance with me at the grocery store. 

We kissed. We finished the beer. Our friend joked that "Your handfasting will self-destruct in three hundred and sixty-six days." and we laughed. And we grinned. And we kissed.

There was a sign by the sea lion which said it was there all the time and was being studied by the Channel Island Aquatic Mammals Institute (or something like that) and that we should just ignore him. He looked very comfortable on the sand.

A not fun post

So on Sunday morning, Nate and I went and toured a local wedding banquet place. We liked the style of the place okay (well, we liked the reception room--I wasn't a fan of the ceremony site), and they seemed well equipped for food, booze, and music... but we didn't love it enough to pay what they were asking for it, and something about the wedding package deal still gives me the heebie-jeebies. I thought I might feel better about it once we went and saw the place, and it's true, they were much more flexible in their packages and rates than I thought they would be... but I left feeling like they were trying to pitch us a bunch of stuff we didn't need or care about, and feeling guilty and inadequate for not liking what they had to offer.

A post too silly even for Twitter

I seriously cannot fucking wait to marry this guy.

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!"

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

So I had me a realization on Saturday.

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.