Here’s what’s going on this week: Shannon and I are trying to do “oh my gosh we live in the same city and we’re not worried about anyone leaving for a while” things, which which you should interpret as mostly sex and sex-related parties but also as just wanting to get lost in each other almost by accident pretty much all of the time. We’re trying to do moving in together (but also not) things, like buying a new mattress and cleaning a lot and figuring out what gets plugged in where under the bed. I’m trying to do moving to a new country things, like getting an American number and a head start on my change of status application. And moving to a new city things, like forcing myself to leave the house sometimes and also interact with humans. And “going away for a week” work things, like all of the work I would normally do in that week but immediately. And wedding things, like ordering napkins and recyclable plastic champagne glasses in bulk and adamantly avoiding writing the ceremony that was due two weeks ago and does Shannon have a tie clip and do either of us need new eye liner and have we asked this person if this other person can sleep on her couch one night, we really need to do that, and did you hear from the legal centre about the prenup and which day is the best day to go get the marriage license and when are your parents visiting again, is that this weekend? Oh wait that’s my parents oops.
Also this post is super late because I tried to write it lying on the bed in the only air conditioned room in the apartment and Shannon kept using me as a body pillow and cooing for some reason. Also because see above.
we dressed up and went out and took this blurry photo in bad lighting
My Lesbian Immigration Wedding Feelings, Part 8
3.4. Fuck flowers.
Fuck flowers. Fuck everything. We’re ordering about a hundred LED twinkling lights and I’m gonna stick gold washi tape on ’em and sprinkle them everywhere and call it a night. I’ve been trying to find a vision for flowers since this thing started and you know what? I don’t want a pile of flowers. I have no idea what to do with a pile of flowers given the space and time and skills and finances available and I’m just going to embrace that. (Shannon is also embracing that.) They look nice and can smell good and I know it will be just a little harder to ping “wedding” in friends’ and families’ brains, but deciding that the wedding would be a 90% flower-free zone is the single most relaxing decision I have made during this whole process. Maybe we will buy enormous bags of petals and sprinkle them all over the lawn to hide how brown and dead the grass is, but maybe not even that.
36.2 Ugh the Canadian dollar.
I don’t care about the stock market but I care a lot about the Canadian dollar and how it’s just so low. I spent lunch on Monday reloading financial exchange pages and eating almond-stuffed olives from the jar and being glad I had a chance to save before moving and resentful that it turns out I didn’t save as much as I thought.
40. I might be allergic to dinner.
We picked the dinner menu and now I’m worried I (also one guest with my exact allergies) won’t be able to eat anything at my own wedding because a lot of it has butter and cheese in it. Ideally I’d be getting one of the starters I know has no allergens in it and also contains some of my favorite foods as my entree but everything is family style and who knows what will happen!
41. What is happening the morning after?
So Shannon and I both love a lot of people and most of them are far away but some of them are closer and too numerous to attend the ceremony and anyway we’re having a drop-in mimosa-laden brunch the morning after the wedding and we planned it in an hour yesterday and at some point someone needs to order the food for it from this local Cuban bakery and also invite the people we hope will attend.
42. Shannon (now) has nothing to wear.
Shannon got a custom suit back in January and since then has started working out and only tried on her suit again yesterday and it is no longer the well-fitted masterpiece it once was and her emergency tailor doesn’t take appointments or apparently tell potential clients when she’s going to be out for the day and the sort of alterations necessary will take a week at least and I am concerned.
Her wedding Converse leather high-tops should arrive in the next day or two. For a wedding present I gave her both the shoes themselves and permission to get married in them and hopefully they look okay with the suit she will hopefully still be able to wear.
16.3. I got a haircut, it is rad.
I found an Instagram model with hair I liked and one billion selfies depicting it from every angle and took the best representations of those angles to my hair dresser. The result is half way between “new thing I really wanted to try” and “my old hair” and works better, I think, than either. I also liked how she styled it (she used a diffuser and two minutes) and am going to try to do basically the same thing. Maybe I will get a clean up that morning and get her to do the same thing! WHO KNOWS.
the same but also better
39.3. It’s almost definitely going to be too hot to wear my dress.
I tried on my dress, which is black velvet with multiple slips, last night and in addition to not being really sure how to move in it (I have no idea how to make my long stride adapt to something that’s tight down to my ankles), I felt itchy and too hot immediately, even standing in front of the air conditioner, and I couldn’t really walk or bend to put my shoes on and I was tripping over the train when I did walk (and it’s more a puddle than a train, and the dress is so tight that anything hiked does not fall naturally back into place without someone else pulling it aggressively into place) and I started to worry about my ability to pee or eat or remain conscious if it’s really hot that evening. I’ve since ordered a short, light-weight, less intense back-up dress that is still black and involves a lot of strategic vents on the internet last night so that my look doesn’t end up being “40s Movie Star Passing Out From Heat Exhaustion,” just in case.
40. I found the things to wear along with the dress, mostly.
I’m borrowing jewelry from my mom, which nicely takes care of her feeling involved and me forgetting that jewelry was something to think about until now. There are earrings and they have pearls.
Related: did you know pearls dissolve in your mouth eventually? This is a fun fact I learned the other day when my pearl tongue piercing, which I had noticed shrinking over the course of a few months without much concern, dropped through the bottom of my tongue. (My piercer is awesome and replaced it, so everything will still match.)
When trying on dress #1 earlier I also noticed that my ideal lingerie situation might be to not have a lingerie situation. I don’t wear bras in my daily life and the dress straps fall at an angle so I am opting out.
28.4. I still don’t want to talk about the ceremony script.
I just don’t.
@shanito "made out"
— Carolyn Yates (@c_yates) August 27, 2015
Okay I do a little. Obviously it doesn’t need to be perfect, especially the first pass, and I know it doesn’t need to be perfect, and I also know that the later it gets the less time our officiant will have to practice and the less time we have for changes and the more rushed it feels, but also I just do not have something I’m happy with yet. Also until now Shannon and I were trying to work on it together, but it turns out that this is one of those things that we both need me to just handle while she takes care of other things and maybe that will help and maybe it won’t but either way this thing — something, anything — is happening before Friday, she wrote, with determination.
Feelings? Wedding questions? Immigration questions? Email our team of married/getting married/immigrating/immigrated humans at youneedhelp @ autostraddle dot com or leave a question/feeling in the comments!
Kitten, have no worries.
Put your shoes on. Then dress. If this trick works with shoes and lacing corset it has to work with dress.
I’m crossing fingers.
This is good advice
I am getting married in 8 days and this post basically sums up my life. So excited to be married, SO DONE WITH WEDDING PLANNING.
I am having this feeling exactly.
Hey sweethearts ~ neither of you need to worry about anything.
When we got married, it was unexpected (long story), with no time to plan. 11 years later, it is all the silly ridiculous things that stay in my mind and make me smile: my wife chugging her champagne and saying “let’s get this done then” (I thought it was horrifically unromantic – whilst she was just totally nervous), the pasta salad no-one wanted to eat, the hike to go see eagles in the special eagle area where none appeared (we see them randomly everywhere now). If I were going to regret anything, it’s not letting her take a photo of me as I got dressed because I hadn’t grabbed good underwear – and really, now that would have just been something else to smile about.
Your love for each other – your new lives together. How to grow individually and together. These are the cake – the rest is icing.
It will all be beautiful – you are shaping a new future. Every twitch~twinge you feel is just your wings unfurling.
Much love to both of you <3.
That was really beautiful!
<3<3<3
Our mantra leading up to our wedding was, “as long as we end up married, it’s a good wedding” and it was true. And it was helpful to be released from stressing too much about the details.
Also, we didn’t do flowers despite us both being really into flowers in daily life, and it was such the right decision. They’re expensive, they’re fussy, lights do just as much to make a place festive and they’re way less stressful.
Oh, and if it helps at all, I was way too hyped up to eat at our wedding. We spent all this time and energy cooking our favorite foods and I mean, I ate it, but I couldn’t really focus on it, there were too many people from every single part of our lives and too much to think about and we had just gotten married and I could not concentrate on the food. So there’s a chance it won’t matter if you can’t eat most of the food.
Yes to the flower situation. Cuban place? Is is Porto’s? =D HAIR LOOKS GREAT A++++
FUCK A BUNCH OF FLOWERS, MAN.
I hope that local Cuban bakery is Portos because that place is amazing
It is! I did not believe Shannon when she said it was a Thing because I have never experienced a bakery that was a Thing before, but comments about it are making me pretty excited about it.
Celiac runs in my family, so I’ve navigated the “how to make sure the bride / mother of the groom / misc celiacs get food they can safely eat” issue at multiple family weddings.
My best advice – make someone in charge of setting aside some of the food you can eat and saving it for you (and your friend). Maybe put your friend with the same allergy in charge of that. Or if you have a caterer type situation, ask them to make a separate box for you and label it (this saved me at my brother’s wedding – it was kind of diy and family style and no one serving the food knew if it was gf, but when I went into the kitchen I found three small cardboard boxes of food carefully labeled gluten free and I was so happy).
Tl;dr: designate someone (who doesn’t have a major wedding role) to be in charge of getting you safe to eat food – even if you don’t feel like eating, it sucks to not have the option to eat safely.
And it’s going to be great. Congratulations.
This is such good advice! At my friends wedding she was so busy/nervous/stressed she forgot to eat so we all just started getting plates of food and taking them to her periodically for a few mouthfuls.
Your hair is magnificent! And I am very interested in why pearls dissolve in your mouth. I’m going to go look that up now.
GOOD LUCK GOOD LUCK GOOD LUCK–YOU’VE GOT THIS!!!!