One day to go: car dies, Brian freaks, and Jordan has no woodland help

Tomorrow morning, we will get up and get ready and get married. We’re both excited, yes; but we’re both very nervous, too. When I tell people that, they tilt their head, wrinkle their brow, and said, “Ohhhh. Really?” Like the fact that I’m nervous means I’m having second thoughts, or that I’m not a ‘good’ bride; that I should be skipping around the house each and every minute feeling great, as little birds and woodland creatures sneak into the apartment and sing songs to me while tailoring my dress and folding all my tissue paper pompoms with their teeth. The misconceptions we have of weddings and brides and the planning of weddings is atrocious. I mean, yes, if woodland creatures ran in here, Sleeping Beauty-style, and started organizing my living room full of decorations, while bathing me with buckets of rainwater and weaving flowers into my hair, I probably would feel excited every minute of every day leading up to this thing. But since they haven`t shown up yet and we have a large (and rather unusual) wedding we’re working on, and the closest thing to musical woodland help I have is my fiancé, who occasionally and inexplicably breaks out into ‘Man, I feel like a woman’ by Shania Twain…yeah, thanks for asking: I’m nervous.

Worse part? I’m nervous on two levels; and worse than that? People judge both. I’m nervous because I want our amazing project to conclude beautifully, with everything working well and everyone’s contributions shining; and then I’m nervous because we’re about to embark on this major rite of passage, this thing called ‘getting married’ where you go from a “Miss” to a “Missus” (or a “Mizz”), and people ask about kids and don’t believe you when you say “All I want are puppies.” I will be called ‘ball and chain’, ‘the wife’, and possibly even ‘nag’. Nooo, no: I’m sure I’ll be called nag. We are legally and spiritually bound to each other, and there’s just a real feeling of weightiness to that. So I spend my time oscillating between worrying about the wedding, and worrying about getting married. But, though I’d like to focus on the getting married portion, we’ve spent the last few days hyperfocused on the wedding…

I worked for hours yesterday on our seating plan, making sure everyone has a seat, and that everyone has a placemat with their name on it, and that the placemat has their table number and seat assignment on it. Then I redid several tables as people changed their RSVP’s. Then I redid it again when more people changed their RSVP’s.

Brian did a hero’s worth of little tasks, all these things that needed to happen last minute: putting tape on the back of a sign, coordinating rides for groomsmen, planning to get our car over to the hotel so we don’t have to drive the day of our wedding. He kept complaining of feeling lightheaded and I kept shoving glasses of water at him.

I had to call my parents several times to ask questions about the tiniest details, and to check on my dad’s car—the car that is driving all the girls plus myself to the venue—because its brake line gave out on Thursday and Dad had been left with nothing but a parking break on the middle of Fallowfield Road. Oh yeah, I don’t think I mentioned this yet, but the cool vintage car that was supposed to be my ride to the venue? Yeah, it broke down, too. Afraid to take a risk on an antique that none of us have ever driven before, we declined to see how the repairs turned out and opted to take Dad’s car. Then the brakes went. Well, they’ve been fixed but it’s been a helluva couple of days and I was so worried about my dad.

Anyway, then I kept wandering in and out of Base Camp, formerly referred to as our living room, trying to make sure that the fifteen boxes of decorations and incidentals was fully stocked. In the late afternoon, Brian just looked terrible. He’s very empathetic and the amount of stressed-out people that we were talking to, plus the ranting-raving stress of his blushing bride, meant he’d had his fill. I breathed in and out a few times and suggested he go for a climb at the rock climbing gym. I thought I’d have to really push to get him to go, but we both knew he needed it. Out the door he went, into our car, which has been notoriously loud for the last week…ah yes, if you’re not on Twitter, you haven’t heard, but Jude (our car) needs a new muffler, resonator, brakes, and drive belt. $1000 of repairs, all diagnosed by the mechanic as ‘Not critical and can wait ‘til after the wedding’. Phew.

About an hour later as I’m working away on something for the wedding that I, no joke, have already forgotten, I get a call from Brian on my cell. His voice has that gruff choked sound that he gets when he’s wept over something. And do you know what he says? “Hi; how are you?” Even though I can hear he’s in distress. He does this every time, this terminal politeness, and it means my response sounds jerky, but I just cut him off and say, “What happened.” He says he was driving home, and there was a terrible sound, and the exhaust system’s pipe fell down onto the pavement. He says he’s almost home but he has to drive really slow because the pipe is dragging the whole way along and the engine is very loud. This is where I go into Crisis Mode, which (lucky for us all) is where I become very calm, clearheaded, and resourceful. This is why I do well in social work: I am genetically built to deal with this kind of stress and get everyone through it together. I tell Brian he’s doing great, and to just get the car home. Then I hang up, try to get my dad on the phone for some advice, and only have a minute of puppy-like whimpering when I can’t get him.

Brian arrives, and I know this because I can hear Jude growling and screeling along from about four blocks away. He pulls into the parking lot and we both look under the car: there’s the muffler pipey thing, with the part that attaches at the front of the car dragging along the road. We discuss, with Brian using a lot of car words like ‘bracket’ and ‘pipe’ and ‘manifold’, maybe, and ‘warp core’ and ‘dilithium crystals’ I think; I say, Okay but we need a garage, yes? We have one we like, but we need the closest thing possible, so that’s Canadian Tire, 2 km (about a mile) away. Ohhhkay. I peek at the clock and see that we’ve got fifteen minutes before they close for the day, but I don’t say a word and I don’t say we need to hurry. I just let Brian drive Jude up the hill.

As we’re driving along, Jude is so loud that I feel pain in my eardrums. The jingly-clattering sound of the pipe is horrible and I keep worrying it’ll snag a pothole and somehow stop the forward momentum of the car or something. I keep looking over at Brian, with his tear-filled eyes, and back at the pedestrians along the way, who are gaping at us with complete shock. You can tell that every one of them thinks we mustn’t possibly know about the pipe, or that we’re lunatics for driving the car like this. We’re both so tense, though, I realize they have to know we’re not out for a joyride. Somewhere after the tenth or twelfth startled pedestrian, I start laughing. Brian peers at me from the corner of a watery eye and starts to snicker, too.

We get Jude booked in at the mechanics and reaffirm that the garage is open on Sunday and can work on her. I call my friend MJ, who lives just up the street, for a drive, and we sit on the curb to wait. I ask Brian, “Okay, so walk me through this one more time.” He retells the tale of leaving the gym, the desk guy giving him a free Gatorade, and the car falling apart on the parkway. The second time through, I stop him mid-story and ask, “Waitaminit, honey. It wasn’t the car that made you cry?” No; turns out it was the Gatorade and congratulations-on-your-wedding handshake from the gym guy…though the car, later, didn’t help. Well, I start to laugh; I’m not being mean but I’m sort of relieved. I thought the car was the last straw on poor Bri’s back, and it wasn’t: it was a bottle of juice and a handshake. Then Brian starts to laugh a bit and we laugh about how this sucks. We both say we are never, ever, ever getting married again, and then we kiss a lot.

MJ shows up, takes us home, and we splurge on some takeout from a pub on the corner. We eat in the bedroom—the only room free of wedding crap—and then we work on some more tasks, but at a slower pace with the list divided up into things that can be handled the next day. Around ten o’clock we turn on some old 30 Rock episodes, and somewhere in there, we must have fallen asleep. And here we are on Sunday.

We’ll update you hopefully later today. The car may be fixed on time, or it may not, I can’t control that. What I can control is organizing the bleep out of this wedding crap here at home. I can make sure everything is ready, and I can take good care of my sweetie, who needs a day of accomplishable tasks with rewards at the end. I think this wedding planning business is just an opportunity for a couple to practice being married, really: working together, dealing with stress, threatening to kill each other’s family…after planning this wedding, regular daily living will seem way more like a Disney movie than planning this thing ever did.

One day to go…