Mom’s big day
Rather than face 600 wedding guests and 14 bridesmaids just over a week ago, a Georgia bride-to-be hopped a bus to Albuquerque. But to hear local moms talk, it’s a wonder more mothers of the bride don’t run away.
This Mother’s Day we pause to celebrate Inland Northwest moms who have reached one of the pinnacle moments of motherhood – the day they send their daughter or son down the aisle. When the IN Life section asked for local women to send photos of their big day, our mailbox began to overflow with letters. We lost count somewhere around 150, and they just kept pouring in, along with tales of near-disaster and delight, exhaustion and sheer exhilaration.
Today we’re sharing some of their stories, whether they’re in the mood to laugh, to vent or to shed tears all over again, along with a selection of the photos we received. We’ve discovered this rite of passage looms large in the lives of women. It may mean finally letting their child go, confronting their own mortality, or simply accepting that they’ll never lose that last 20 pounds in time for the wedding day.
“It’s tough,” says Leslie Milk, author of “It’s Her Wedding and I’ll Cry If I Want To” (Rodale, $15.95). “Nobody ever refers to the mother of the bride as a lovely girl. The term mother of the bride conveys a feeling of arch supports, bifocals and learning to love Lycra. There’s no way around it. If your daughter’s old enough to get married, you’re a grown up.”
The role can also be a lot of work. Joellen Pickens planned her daughter Julie’s wedding in Coeur d’Alene last August. Because Julie and her fiancé lived in California, Pickens wound up running around after work gathering up tulle samples and shipping them off to the bridal couple.
“I know now who can get me single-serve champagne bottles from Spain, where to buy 2-inch high Chinese takeout food boxes, bolts of sage tulle, wild salmon, Dutch and French cheese, calla lilies and a lot more,” she says.
Today’s weddings have become more expensive and more elaborate than any time in history. The wedding industry estimates the average cost of an American wedding is $22,000, and Inland Northwest observers say they run from $500 to $30,000 on up around here. From June 2003 to June 2004, there were 2.1 million weddings in the United States, costing approximately $80 billion, according to the Association for Wedding Professionals International.
“When I got married, all I had to worry about was the wedding itself,” Milk says. “Now they’re like coronations – they go on for days.”
It’s not uncommon for mothers of the bride to be lining up entertainment for out-of-town guests, baking lemon-filled cakes or cleaning up the reception site afterward. The Rev. Linda K. Crowe of Spokane Valley not only conducted the wedding ceremony for her daughter and son-in-law in 2003, she also sewed the bride’s silk wedding dress.
As Eva Roberts, owner of Just American Desserts in Spokane, was decorating six tiered wedding cakes the day before her daughter’s ceremony last May, she got a call from her 95-year-old grandmother at the hotel. She needed a box of Depends.
Roberts dropped everything and ran the errand. “You’re pulled all these different directions,” she says, laughing now.
Her only daughter, Ashley, was married at Lady of Lourdes Cathedral and hopped in a horse-drawn carriage with her groom, Scott Dearie, for a trip to Riverfront Park and a ride on the Carousel. The year of planning included stress, friction and the occasional meltdown. It ended with Roberts barefoot on the Spokane Club dance floor, brimming over with happiness.
“I know we spent a lot of money, but these are memories we’ll have all our life,” she says.
Pat Carpenter, a Spokane Valley mom, counts down the days to Sept. 17, the day her daughter Christi, will marry Stephen Peek.
The big surprise for her: the cost.
“Anytime you mention the word wedding, I swear the price goes up,” Carpenter says. “You have to constantly think, ‘Where can I go where the price is cheaper?’ “
She researched five different wedding locations, with the most expensive costing $3,500. She landed on a site near Clayton, Wash., which has a gazebo, a fountain and even a carriage ride for the bridal couple. The price will be approximately $2,200.
“When people say the average wedding is $20,000, believe it,” Carpenter says. “We’re going the cheapest ways we can and when it’s all said and done, we’ll have about $10,000 in ours. To me, it’s a lot of money.”
Milk interviewed sticker-shocked parents for her book.
“One father of the bride described it to me as buying an expensive sports car, driving it for five hours, and then pushing it off a cliff,” she says. “It can be hugely expensive if you do not get real.”
Wedding gowns alone, Milk says, can run anywhere from $500 to $10,000.
“It’s a big, big business,” she says. “That’s because this is still an area little girls and big girls dream about.
“It was astounding to me when I talked with brides and mothers. A bride who had been in the Peace Corps who had been cutting her hair with cuticle scissors for a year, suddenly she wants the big, poufy dress,” Milk says. “She’s out of the bush and into this balloon skirt.”
Many mothers of the bride simply go into denial over the cost of the wedding. But the moment that jerks them back into reality comes when they finally start dress shopping – for themselves.
In her book “Mother of the Bride” (Algonquin Books, $10.95), author Ilene Beckerman describes the ordeal of finding the right dress. She tried on pale pink chiffon, turquoise crepe, blue sequins and white moiré. She even pulled on green velvet.
“A Rodney Dangerfield line came to me, ‘If that dress had pockets, you’d look like a pool table.’ The dress had pockets.”
Too many of these frocks, mothers of the bride agree, look as if they were designed for their own grandmothers.
“In the industry, they think mothers want to be draped in layers of chiffon – no, we don’t – or sexy like we’re going to the prom again. And no, we don’t,” says Marcella Davis, owner of Marcella’s Bridal on Spokane’s North Side. She designs and makes 90 percent of the mother-of-the-bride dresses she sells.
She finds most mothers postpone shopping until the last minute. “Two months before the wedding they say, ‘I don’t want you to take my measurements yet, I’m going to lose 20 pounds.’ “
The etiquette books recommend that the mother of the bride select a dress first, in a shade that complements the bride’s colors, then let the mother of the groom know what she’ll be wearing.
Color clashes can trigger angst. Davis remembers one wedding when the bridesmaids wore pastel pinks and mints and the bride’s mom wore soft yellow. But the groom’s mom showed up in a bright floral print of giant tiger lilies in orange, purple, lime green and fuchsia.
“She looked like she got in a fight in a fruit farm,” Davis says.
But many mothers of the groom try to fade tactfully into the background.
“My daughter’s mother-in-law said her role was to ‘Shut up, show up and wear beige,’ ” Milk says. “That’s not totally wrong.”
Davis, however, believes a woman should never introduce herself as “just the mother of the groom.” “She’s not “just,” she is THE mother of the groom,” Davis says. “If there were no mother of the groom, there would be no wedding.”
Considering all the sources of potential conflict between the bride and her own mother, though, the mother of the groom may simply be pleased to avoid the line of fire.
Mary Ann Slade, owner of the Art of Weddings in Spokane Valley, says occasionally a bride will leave her store in tears.
“You hear about ‘Bridezillas,’ ” Slade says, “but you also see Godzilla moms.”
Those are the moms who belittle their daughters in the dressing room.
“My heart goes out to them,” Slade says. “I want to say, ‘I don’t care what dress you buy, but I want you to have the dress that you love.’ “
Angela Hong, manager of Bridal Collections in downtown Spokane, observes three different types of mothers.
There are the quiet moms who rarely speak up. There are the take-charge control-freak moms. And there are the warm, assertive moms who help their daughters with deft suggestions and plenty of moral support.
Hong says, “That’s the mom who says, ‘Sweetie, you look beautiful. I love them all.’ “
This May a fresh crop of wedding moms scurry around town, picking up invitations, buying “Love” stamps at the post-office, and double-checking that the caterer and the florist, the photographer, the minister, and the cake baker will all come through as promised. They hope to not only perfect the details for this summer’s weddings, but also enhance their relationships with their daughters and sons.
Carol Ruemping of Spokane will be mother of the bride on May 28 when her daughter Darcy, will be married at Green Lake United Methodist Church in Seattle. Both of her sons married in Seattle, too.
“I kept saying, ‘I wish it was in Spokane,’ Ruemping says. “My friend said, ‘Now quit whining. It’s not your wedding.’ So that put it all in perspective.”
Lately, Ruemping has been tying 900 pieces of ribbon onto the favors for the reception, working on guest bags for visiting family and friends checking into the hotel, and looking for containers for the flower petals that will be thrown at the church. “I guess I’m doing all the things Darcy doesn’t want to do and that I think need to be done,” Ruemping says. “She’s very organized, very efficient, not so much into the frilly little hoo-ha things.”
Ruemping follows her own advice: “Keep in mind your goal – you want them to be happy, and you want this to be a special, blessed day for them.”
Seasoned mothers of the bride know that goal doesn’t require perfection. Author Leslie Milk looks back on her daughter’s wedding with great pride. Yet it was a day when the rain clouds moved the wedding indoors, the disposable cameras for the tables got left in the limo by mistake and the elastic on her skirt gave way and nearly fell to her knees. She now regards those mishaps as minor details.
“What matters is my daughter Meredith says it was the best day of her life,” she says fondly. “That’s the only thing that matters.”