12 min read
Today’s theme seems to be Retrowave
Here’s part two of how this week has been an emotionally draining one. I’ve got a bottle full of ice cold water, a fan pointed at my face, and the air conditioning on to combat this ridiculous heat outside while I’m here writing on the treadmill. I really hope this one is shorter than Part One from yesterday.
I had texted my Mom about what happened with my pup (obviously I just used his name instead of outing all of us) earlier in the morning. Part way through the drive back home from Charlotte, we got a phone call from her. It’s not too unusual for my partner and I to chat with my Mom on the phone together, so we answered the call. It started out innocently enough with us discussing what happened to my pup and how things are going with her.
Things got a bit more interesting when the topic of the wedding came up. Again, it started off innocently about us telling her about the wedding venue we are leaning towards, but things got weird after that.
The conversation from start to finish was about 45 minutes, so I’m not going to go into every single moment of it. However, my partner and I gave each other some weird looks when she started questioning our decision about having a pasta bar as the meal at the reception. For a little bit of context, my partner and I absolutely love making fresh homemade pasta from scratch. We almost never use “box pasta” as we call it these days and we even make our own pasta sauce from scratch. We enjoy making the pasta, cooking it, and eating it because it’s something special to us: it’s sort of a passion we both share. We’ve modified our recipe over time to include whole wheat flour and super veggie green powder to make it even healthier for us. We’ve been talking about a pasta bar basically from the beginning (so for months at this point) and we plan on including choices for red and white sauce as well as chicken a few different ways. I hope it’s pretty clear that the complaints about the pasta bar idea from my Mom really came out of left field for us.
In short, my Mom was calling it “cheap” and did not feel like it would really be honoring our wedding guests to serve them, as she put it, “spaghetti and meatballs”. To be very clear, we’re not trying to be cheap, we’re trying to make this reception dinner about something we are very passionate about. To be told that it was cheap and that it needed to be elevated because it wasn’t good enough for her really stung. My partner and I sat there in stunned silence for a bit as she talked about how she disapproved of our decision and how she would rather it be something fancier.
By itself, I doubt this would have bothered me too much and I would have just left it as “Okay, we’ll talk to our wedding planner” just to make my Mom shut up. I was definitely irritated though and this felt like yet another piece of criticism she threw on the pile of things she doesn’t like about our wedding. Prior to this, we’ve had:
And those are only the items that I know about because my partner had a girls’ day out one time with my Mom and paternal grandmother to talk about the wedding and to go shopping. Beyond the wedding, my partner and I both have felt unsure about how my Mom feels about the relationship. Yes, it definitely started in an unconventional way and I can understand if things seem like they happened all at once a bit quickly from her perspective. The thing is: there’s a lot I do not and cannot tell my Mom about my friends, lifestyle, activities and hobbies, etc. because so much of it is tied up in the kink lifestyle. Maybe there should be another topic about that. (And now is when I add the Future Topics section to the welcome page). Later on it came out in the phone call that there is a lot of built up resentment on her end about me not talking more about my friends and what I like to do. Well, while I get that being frustrating when your son is so private about so much of his life, I absolutely know that she would either flat out reject that part of my life or be very judgmental over it. I know this because of how she rejected parts of my life in my childhood and teen years and how she judges me about my choice of dying my hair vibrant colors.
Apologies for the small rant, I’m getting a bit worked up again, it seems. It short, the comment about the pasta bar was more or less the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I had been letting a lot roll off my back, but I took quite a lot of offense to her calling our choice of dinner cheap. Moreover, she claimed that our guests would be “expecting more” as if this is some sort of competition or something? Fuck, I don’t know what she wants it to be like, but I know my friends wouldn’t care if we gave them chicken nuggets and fries. This day is about us and celebrating the joining of our lives in an official manner, not about what food we serve.
And that’s something else that bothered me a lot from what my Mom was saying: she talked about how it’s so important that this is our wedding and she wants us both to be happy, but in the next breath she talks about how our choice isn’t good enough and how it’s about our guests having proper wedding food. I felt like she was sending mixed signals about this and other things that I listed above. Do you want us to be happy or do you want us to conform to your expectations of a wedding?
She very clearly mentioned how this wedding is not what she envisioned it to be all these years as I was growing up. Again, yeah I get that, but on the other hand this is our wedding. She already had hers and got to make it the way she wanted. My partner and I have been working to save up to pay for all of this on our own and without going into debt. We want to make it our vision and we don’t want anyone feeling having a say in what it should be like because they pitched in money.
Apologies for how disjointed things become here.
This whole time I was sort of just sitting there as my partner and my Mom were talking: I was driving the car and wanted to focus on the road instead of getting too emotionally involved (that’s foreshadowing by the way). I can’t really remember what caused me to become so upset exactly, but I remember becoming extremely firm with my Mom about how this is our wedding and we absolutely welcome feedback. At this point, she was starting to get how she does when she’s having an argument and doing some annoying emotional manipulation about how she just wants to help. Normally that phrase is fine, but my Mom has a way of talking sometimes that just…it just irks me. I was angry now because she was trying to argue against my point before I even finished my sentence, and I told her so. I told her “No, I’m not done yet, and you interrupted me before I could finish making my point to try to inject your own. What I was going to say is I want feedback and input, but I don’t want a yes-man who agrees with us constantly.” I can’t remember the rest of the sentence, but it basically said how I need to hear something positive out of her about the wedding instead of just the negative.
I really do care about what they think and I really do want input, but I’m so damn tired of feeling like our wedding isn’t good enough for some reason. I broke down at this point with everything that happened this week and the previous night weighing on me thus far. I started telling her through tears about how I care about them more than anything and how I want their input without a doubt, but I want to be an adult in charge of my own wedding to my partner. I told her, through yet more tears, about how I felt really hurt about her negativity around the pasta bar, something we are so passionate about, and her repeated remarks about my partner’s clothing and style choices.
Things gradually de-escalated from there when she realized that I was hurt and not just frustrated with her. I think it finally hit her that her words had an impact on me. As things continued to de-escalate, we had an honestly very productive talk about why she felt hurt and why I felt hurt. I think we both came to an understanding about the other’s perspective that we hadn’t considered before. We were almost home by the time we had all said our goodbyes on the phone and I was felt absolutely emotionally drained.
Continuing from yesterday’s note about the loss of J, it was time for his funeral service. We had a whole 30 minutes to get home, change out of our normal clothes, get into funeral attire, and make sure everything was okay enough emotionally before heading out.
There is not much for me to write about regarding the funeral service other than it was very nice and I’m so proud of my partner for going up and telling a short story about one of her memories of J. I’ve always said that no funeral is complete without people laughing because that’s just how I think we cope best with loss. As humans, we cope in many ways, but fondly remembering funny moments is something we can all almost universally connect on. Well, that and listening to the pastor talk about how through preparing for the service he learned about Cards Against Humanity. Nearly everyone went “Oh No” at the same time!
One thing that really surprised me was at the very end when my partner mentioned how amazing I am for being supportive through the service. She’s always talked about how touching me helps to ground her, so I made sure to hold her hand, put my arm around her, or just lean into her a bit to remind her that I was here for her. She was really grateful and told me about how her previous partners really did not do much of that at all. It’s just another day of me showing her through actions that supporting a partner through hard times is key and trying to convince her that this really is the bare minimum of what a life partner, or even friend, should be doing.
By the time everything was over, I was so emotionally drained. I feel like all my tanks of emotional juices were empty or inaccessible and I just didn’t know how to feel at all. We got home and I sort of just collapsed in bed and let myself watch YouTube videos. Though, I wasn’t really watching them, I was sort of just letting them play on my phone while my mind went through and processed everything.
Today, I am happy to say that I am feeling a fair bit better. I don’t think I’m quite ready to get back into gear or put my pup hood on again, but I’m getting there. I’ve requested tomorrow off as a mental health day/bereavement day to finish recovering from all this.
Well, this is technically a bit shorter than yesterday’s so I’m glad I made good on that promise.
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