Moping motherless maniac (the Follow Up!)

Hey ESB,

I wanted to give you a little update on what happened after I wrote you in May of 2011. I took your advice and stopped wedding planning for a couple of months to try and work through my grief and give myself some much-needed head space. In the fall of 2011, my then-fiance and I took a vacation to Italy to visit my father, who was living there at the time, and we fell back in love with Florence and re-solidified our desire (need) to get hitched there. When I got back to the states, my excitement was renewed about the whole wedding thing.

I don't know that I mentioned this in my first post, but I was studying in Florence years ago and my Mom and stepdad came to visit and I mentioned that one day (when I was ready to commit to anything other than cheap wine), I'd want to get married in Florence. The woman STOLE MY IDEA and married my amazing stepdad in Florence in 2006. She loved Italy more than any place on earth. After her wedding, I reminded her that I was still getting married there one day, to which she would laugh and point out my endless string of bad boyfriends and we'd laugh together. 

I totally lucked out when, about 3 weeks into dating, my then-boyfriend tells me that Florence is the most romantic place in the world and he loved it too. I took the perspective that planning a wedding there, to show off the glory of my Mom's (and our) favorite city, was like my final swan song to her. Because she had been privy to some of my super-early pre-engagement wedding ideas (and because we were closer than Charlton Heston and his guns), I felt like I could imagine how she would critique and improve upon my and my then-fiance's plans and ideas. In a weird way, planning my wedding was the last thing we would ever do together. And it felt like she was there with me for every step of the way.

I also was blessed to have an amazing network of people to help me: my fiance, my aunts, my grandmother, my two dads and my friends. They were there for all of it: the crafting, the bad wedding show marathons, the endless dress search (when I tried on 42 dresses and ended up in tears because I didn't know which one I loved and my Mom couldn't weigh in). Oh, and because my fiance wanted my dress to look like the one in the Guns and Roses November Rain video...boys are silly. Finally I found a dress by Carol Hannah, who was on Project Runway when my Mom was sick and she and I would lie in her bed and watch together (and be catty and bitchy and all that good stuff) and Carol Hannah was our absolute favorite. The dress was perfectly me and the connection to Mom through CH made it that much more special.

Anyway, this is us here.

We kept it small--20 guests, a morning wedding with an extravagant luncheon. Was it hard? Sure. Did everyone cry a ton? Yup. But Mom was everywhere. She had been married in the same room I was vowing to be with my husband for eternity. That was POWERFUL. The toasts were sobbing messes. But there's this wedding day magic that people who draw hearts above their "i"s talk about that is so totally real and takes over and all you can focus on is that you're marrying your best friend and nothing can get you down (bronchitis be damned). 

I don't know what I believe happens to people when they die, but in one way or another, Mom was there (in the art and the smell of the food and the architecture and the winding, cobbled streets of Florence) and she was so damn happy for us.

--No longer Moping or Hyperventilating. 

*****

Way to go, ladypants!!!

It's so great to hear the real story behind some of the glossygorgeous images featured on SMP...

(Photo by Lisa Poggi)