I keep feeling the urge to sit down and organize everything wedding-related, but when I think about doing it, I’m completely overwhelmed. That “4 months” in my countdown ticker is making me nervous. That’s not very much time.

Sometimes I wish it would just get here, already. As much as I’m enjoying the planning and the excuse to drool over flowers and gowns, I hate the waiting.

And I’m starting to hate the transition in the relationship. I feel like James and I are in limbo. Every disagreement has hanging on it the unspoken thought: “Can we get through this? Is there a sign in here somewhere?”

It’s so frustrating because saying yes to James was the easiest decision I ever made in my life. I don’t ever doubt it. But I feel like I should, and that confuses me.

For so many years, it was ingrained in me by school, work, that whole big question of what are you going to do with your life? to do what I want; don’t depend on others for happiness.

But since I’ve met James, I’ve found that kind of thinking to be backwards. The lowest points in my life have been when I’ve felt bereft of human companionship, when I’ve felt alone and un-cared-for.

What schools and career paths don’t prepare you for is that time when who you love and how you love them are more important than what you do and how much you make.

There is a decided pressure on my generation, especially the female members of it, to save the world or make a million bucks. — but don’t fall into the trap of caring for your husband or children. Cause that’s a step backwards.

This time of transition is so painful, I think, because I am trying to get my head around the idea that most of what I’ve been told is wrong. I don’t plan to give up my career or my dreams when I get married, but I am realizing that I am no longer an individual.

We’re not having a unity candle at our ceremony and part of the reasoning is that we are not two becoming one. We will still be two. But together, we will be something more.

Growing is hard and painful and scary. But at least I’m not doing it alone.

I know I promised a full report on Sharon’s wedding, but I just haven’t gotten there yet. However, I did just respond to a question on a wedding board asking, “When did you know your fiance was a keeper?”

Here’s my answer:

I’m not sure I have an exact moment…the feeling kinda snuck up on me, and was suddenly just there, fully bloomed.

We were friends for a few months before we started dating. I was seeing someone else, and when we broke up, James (FH) showed up at my house with a bottle of wine and a bag of Smartfood. And a shoulder to cry on.

He was the one who took me out for pizza to celebrate the first draft of the first chapter of my thesis.

He was the one who helped me through three batches of not-quite-right fudge to make Christmas presents for my family.

He is the one who fed, cleaned up after and played with my rabbits while I was away for two weeks.

He is the one who tells me I’m beautiful when I’m just lounging around the house in sweats.

He is the one who lugs firewood up from the basement and builds me a fire when I’m cold.

He is the one who refurbished a computer for my parents after seeing how badly theirs was performing.

He is the one who dealt with the alarm company after I burned food in the toaster and set off an ear-piercing alarm where I was house-sitting.

He is the one who holds me when I’m sad and laughs with me when I’m happy. He is the one I want to tell my news. He is the one I want to see first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I knew we would be married. I remember having a discussion about when we wanted to buy a house together. It wasn’t until after he proposed it occurred to me that most people plan the wedding, then think about buying the house. It just seemed so natural that we would be together, as if the marriage were inevitable, so we didn’t even have to discuss it.

I suppose the moment that drove it home more than anything was the first Christmas we spent together. My parents were visiting and while I was helping my mom wrap gifts, she turned to me and said, “Do you think he’s a keeper? Cause I do.”

Today marks our one year anniversary of being engaged. One year ago at this time, we were breaking the news to my parents, ordering champagne, celebrating on a cruise ship.

Man, I wish we were on a cruise ship now…

Yesterday marked six months to the wedding, another important benchmark.

Today, to celebrate, we are waiting for my maid(technically matron) of honor to call us and let us know what the plan is for tonight. Her bestfriend, whose birthday was March 4, died a little under a year ago. We plan to go out to celebrate the day.

Not totally romantic, but important to both of us, since Heather is such an important person in our lives. And I knew Jaci and hung out with her and miss her.

Cheers all around.

(As the sane one, I have reserved the right to edit all posts to bring them more in line with reality. You know, the one you can touch, see, feel and hear. Please see the end of this post for a jump back to reality.)

Another wedding milestone: James had his first wedding-related breakdown this weekend.

We sat down together to do the save the dates (finally!). James starts playing with our “Kennedy photo” that I wanted to use for the magnets. But the more we look at it, the more we each are uncomfortable with how we look in the photo (might have something to do with that 22 inch LCD monitor he has hooked up — I never want to see that many details of my own face). So we go to our engagement photo CDs and start looking for one from there. Then it became a question of black and white or color.

Finally, finally we have a photo we like. But then James says he doesn’t like the idea of the magnets.

Now, since we got engaged I have been blathering on and on about how excited I am to send out magnets, I love the idea, yay magnets. At one point James even said, “Oh, that’ll be easy since I have that magnetic paper. We can just print our own.”

But now he hates magnets.

He suggests postcards instead (I envisioned magnets on postcards, but this is fine, whatever). I get excited, because I think that if we just send postcards, we can save so much money: we won’t need envelops, the postage will be less, it will be nice and easy.

So we go along that route for a while until James says, “But how are you going to fit all that information on a postcard? Alternate hotels, things to do in the area, restaurants…”

I try to explain to him that a save the date is just a simple little card announcing the date.

That’s when the meltdown happens. He goes off on a whole rant about what a dumb idea it is to just send a postcard with no information but the date; how is anybody going to plan anything? And wasn’t I supposed to be gathering all this information anyway? Why aren’t I more prepared? And we never do anything the way he wants to do it.

I talked him down. If he wants to send out whole packets of info, I’m all for it. I suggest we come back to the project after he finishes his most recent freelance assignment (which he hadn’t even started at this point, so I’m sure that was stressing him out). That way I would have time to pull everything together.

As much as I don’t enjoy getting yelled at, it was kind of fun to hear him insist on making things just so. I love it when he cares about the wedding.

<rant>
Clarification:
We agreed to do the packets because none of my family lives within 600 miles of me and it would be good for planning purposes.

Just as with the bud vases, I didn’t agree to the magnets and there was a certain amount of facetiousness attached to “let’s print them at home” statement.

And furthermore, I fully understand what all of the other robots do with their save the dates. A small card with no info that gets sent out to make everyone look at their pretty (or not) faces a year before the wedding. I think it’s a waste of money to only send out a save the date with no other info. Chances are if you are inviting someone to your wedding you will keep in touch so there is no need to send out a mailing when you could get on the horn and yak their ears off.

By including a postcard in the packet and not as a separate mailed piece we still get to show off our pretty faces but I don’t have the postal service defiling my design with government mandated markings, i.e. postage stamps and routing info.

That all being said: Stop. It’s Hammer Time. </rant>

Further Clarification

The packets we discussed were for the welcome bags in the hotel room. We never actually discussed mailing them out. — JLK

I hit another milestone: My first wedding-related nightmare.

Okay, nightmare is a little strong. Unpleasant dream would be more accurate.

And it wasn’t actually about the wedding. Instead, it was about some sort of one-year-til gathering that we were having. Everyone important (family, friends, those types) got a room at the Wake Robin so that we could do a bunch of planning stuff.

But I got the wrong room. And I was all set up in the wrong room and ready to share it with Kara when I remembered James was coming and we were supposed to be in the honeymoon suite.

So I dragged all my stuff there, but the sheets hadn’t been changed and the cleaning crew had left for the day.

And then everyone showed up: Mom, cousins, friends, all hanging out in our hotel room. And James said he just wanted some time alone with me. He asked if we could go out for drinks.

So I try to get everyone out of the room and notice that James is now missing. When I find him, he says, “Don’t make everyone go. I’m trying to hang out with them.”

I woke up a ball of stress.

This weekend is trying on wedding dresses in Boston. I’m going to try to take some photos, but these boutiques can be pretty strict about that. They don’t want you to copy the design somewhere else, or find it online. Would I do that?

Today is exactly one year from our wedding. I’m calling it our negative anniversary.

We went out to dinner to celebrate.

It’s amazing how much stuff we have figured out already:

date
ceremony location (and officiant)
reception location
menu
wedding rings
engagement photos
photographer (though we haven’t officially asked her yet)
wedding party (though we haven’t officially asked them yet)

I feel like we’ve got a lot of the major stuff out of the way and just have the details to figure out.

Yay! One year to go!

Today James got an email from the Journal’s Apple guy saying he had a great deal on an iMac. James starts drooling.

I tell him there is no way we can afford the computer, even with the discount. Has he seen our bills lately? Is he nuts?

James, of course, doesn’t take this well and a fight brews.

My mind jumps to the worst possible conclusion: We’re going to break up over a computer. A friend of mine, in her young marriage, is currently having a very similar argument with her husband and things are very rocky for them right now. I immediately conclude that we’re headed to the exact same place.

But I mention the fight to another friend, who points out that we should really go with the best machine we can afford, considering how much freelance business James does. It’s worthwhile to make the investment.

And I realize she’s right. James spends an awful lot of time on the computer, and lately, a good chunk of that has been fiddling with things that break. Maybe it does make sense to get a new computer.

So I go back to James and tell him that if he really really needs it, we’ll find a way to make it work. He’s thought about it some and realized that the Mac (a 17-inch) won’t work with the new monitor he has (a 22-inch widescreen) and he loves his monitor. He’s been looking around online and thinks he can get a machine that will do what he needs it to do for a little more than half the price of the Mac.

We decide to do that.

After this resolution, I was absolutely beaming. We had a fight about finances, both compromised and came to a solution we were both happy with. Maybe we aren’t doomed, after all!

Now if we could just get more of our fights to end up this well.

James and I had a little squabble last night that turned into me freaking out about him dying.

Sounds like fun, huh?

The weird thing is that book I was reading totally predicted it: One of the things women have to deal with during the engagement period is the fear that their partner will die or leave in some other way.

I trust James completely as far as faithfulness goes, so I’m freaking out about him dying.

And I’m not even freaking out about some random accident happening tomorrow. No, I’m freaking out that he’ll get heart disease at some point in the future (30 years? 40? 50?).

And I know it’s completely irrational. Okay, not completely. A lot of American men have heart disease. It really could happen to him. But why am I worrying about it now?

After I closed Harry Potter and turned out the light last night, I was gripped by this fear, this worry. As if it gained strength from the darkness and the quiet sound of James’s breath.

I was able to sleep, but my dreams were filled with anxiety.

Right now, the scariest thing about marriage is that it ties you so closely to another person over whom you have so little control. And I don’t mean control over what he does or where he goes. I have no control over what happens to him.

My own death doesn’t frighten me at all compared to how scared I am of James dying.

As James and I were walking to the post office yesterday (we often do this at lunchtime), a woman caught up with us and said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to embarass you, but did you know you have a big rip in your skirt?”

Needless to say, I did not.

I turned the skirt around and, sure enough, about three inches of the back seam had busted open. I was mortified. Not only had a stranger had to point out to me that I’d been walking through the center of Lakeville, that bustling metropolis, with my underwear showing, but it also meant that this skirt was, as I feared, not large enough to cover my nether region.

I’ve been trying to lose weight, on and off, for at least a year. I blamed the weight gain on writing my thesis, but since I’ve been done with that for over a year, I really don’t have an excuse any more. Since the engagement, I’ve been tackling weight loss head on. I’ve been working out four to five times a week, trying to eat more vegetables and fewer boxes of Annie’s mac and cheese, and only allowing myself a drink once a week.

Since the engagement, which was March 7, four months ago, I have lost 5 pounds.

5.

I put on that skirt yesterday morning relieved that I had something that fit. I bought more clothes as my weight crept up, but I didn’t want to buy a whole new wardrobe. One, I can’t afford it. Two, I want to wear the pounds of clothes I have sitting in the attic. So when I found this skirt in the closet and was able to pull it up over my hips, I was relieved. Something from the old stack that I could wear.

Then I ripped it. Probably because I insist in sitting on my legs in strange ways in my office chair. This causes the material to stretch over my rump. Or, in this case, to rip when it cannot accomodate said rump.

I plunged immediately into the pits of body loathing. I hated my hips and butt with such fierceness at that moment. And I mentioned some of this out loud to James.

He told me to stop. Cut me off. He didn’t want to hear it.

Which, of course, made me even madder. Now I had someone to direct my anger at other than myself.

We fought the entire way back from the post office, as we got into the car and on the entire drive home to change my clothes. When I finally ripped off the skirt and started actually crying, James’s demeanor changed. He took me in his arms and told me that he really does think that I’m beautiful and always has. He told me how proud he is of me and my exercising and changing food habits. He told me he admires my willpower. And he told me that my body is changing, that I’m getting firmer in some places and smaller in others, even if I can’t see it. He pointed out that I probably couldn’t have even gotten that skirt on at all a few months ago. He told me not to give up, because he could see improvements in my mood and energy that he linked to the exercise.

James talks a lot about wanting our marriage to be a partnership. I think that’s a fabulous way to look at marriage, but a lot of times I don’t really understand what that means. Yesterday, he showed me. When I was at a real low, he picked me up. That’s what partnership is about — filling in the gaps when the other person needs it.

This week, I hit an important wedding planning milestone: I got so frustrated with everything that I told James I wanted to just elope. We could hop a plane to Vegas, get married and be back before Monday and not have to worry about all this wedding stuff any more.

It’s a little discouraging to think that we’ve got over a year until the wedding and I’ve already had this impulse.

James talked me down, telling me I’d regret it. And I know it’s not what he wants.

The pressure to have a fairy tale wedding, plus to keep all family members, friends and other assorted hangers on happy and smiling, is just too much sometimes.

Maybe instead of Vegas, we could just get on a boat and be married by a captain.

I just need a dress…then I could do it…maybe…