Wedding Bells

So today I got a call from my friend Karen, who's getting married in May. Blah blah how was your weekend, blah blah other random stuff, then, "Um... I uh... OK. Uh..." hesitating for about five more minutes as Karen tried to figure out how to say what she needed to say.

Which was, she's asking somebody else to be her maid of honour. Even though she was my maid of honour when I got married.

Good God, I thought she was going to say something actually awful.

She started to go into an explanation - Vivian sort of brought her and her fiance together, and I have enough on my plate, and etc etc - and I sort of broke in to tell her I wasn't offended. I mean, whatever. We've been friends since we were eight years old, she can have whoever she wants for her maid of honour, it certainly isn't going to come between us. I would hope I'm a little less shallow than that. I mean, as much as I've got on my plate, I would've been thrilled if she'd asked me, but as it is I'll just be happy to help out any way I can and attend as a regular guest.

Anyway. We chatted a bit longer, and then she asked about the kids. Did I want her to invite them? Because, well, there might not be much for them to do at this one place they've looked at, and she's going to invite my mom so she won't be available to babysit, and...

At which point I kind of broke in again and tried to make things perfectly clear. "Look, you're going to be stressed out enough, with planning and dealing with your family, OK? Don't worry about us. Seriously. Do whatever you need to do, let us know what you want us to do or not do, and we'll be happy to do it. If you want us to have our kids babysat, that's great, if you pick a really boring place to get married but want us to bring them along, that's great, we'll bring stuff for them to do... just, really, really, don't worry about us."

Which I think she really needed to hear. I hope it helped.

I remember for our own wedding, Chris had asked his friend Nick to be Best Man, and Nick had to fly in from England the day before the wedding. There was some kind of communication and ticketing snafu, and we were starting to worry that Nick wouldn't make it. A few months later, we were talking to another one of Chris' friends, Phil, who said that he'd started to think to himself, "OK... if Nick doesn't make it... let's see, is my suit dry-cleaned? And do I have a tie that goes well with it? Yeah, OK, I can step in."

I remember thinking at the time, That's a real friend. No, he hadn't been Chris' first choice of Best Man, but he certainly wasn't going to let that stop him from helping out if Chris needed him. And I remember thinking that was the kind of friend I wanted to be too.

So. I hope I'm being that kind of friend.

I told Chris about it and he pointed out that we couldn't afford for me to be maid of honour anyway, which is true. Then I told him about the kid-thing and he said, "Oh, I think they should definitely go."

"Well, yeah, but hon, it may not be very interesting for them-"

"Doesn't matter. It's their aunt's wedding. They should go."

We started to semi-argue about it and I was starting to get worried that maybe he was going to get snippy about it with Karen. I should've known better. "Oh, I'm not going to tell her that!" he said at one point. "Are you kidding? No, no, if she asks us not to bring them, we'll both just smile and say, 'Good choice! No problem!'"

God, I'm so glad my own wedding is behind me. It's so nice to look at the pictures and remember the good parts and not recall the panic and bother and flurries of logistic and etiquette-related messes we had to deal with.