Wedding Stress

She hated my answering machine. She suspected, and rightly so, that I used it as a barrier between us. With the wedding coming up, I was going to have to communicate with her more, and I wanted some degree of control over the interactions.

But she didn’t want to use it. Even today she doesn’t like to use my voicemail. There’s always a long pause before she finally says, “it’s your mother.” Back then, every time she’d call and get my machine, she’d just get a little more angry at me.

Her anger reached the boiling point early one morning about a month before the wedding. She called about 6 am that morning, and got my machine. That was too much. She hung up the phone without leaving a message, and called my fiancé’s apartment. He answered the phone, and admitted I was there. He handed me the phone, and she told me she didn’t have time to discuss it then, but that she would call me later that day and she’d better not get my machine.

I hung up the phone. I knew what was coming later that day. My stomach was in knots. I thought about my options. There was really no reason for me to tolerate the tongue-lashing that was coming. I was grown, living on my own, 500 miles away. I didn’t need financial support from my family. Maybe I should have let her get the answering machine that afternoon, make it clear that the balance of power had shifted.

But I didn’t. It was ugly, as I knew it would be. I took it, crying quietly. I never wanted her to know I was crying, and over the phone, I could hide it better. I didn’t talk much anyway during these tirades; it did no good. “Talking back” just fueled the fire of her rage.

This time, the threat to make me comply with her rules was to cancel the wedding. That was so tempting. Sure, I wanted to marry my boyfriend, but I didn’t care about the trappings of the wedding. It was going to be a simple wedding anyway. It was mostly going to be about family and our parents’ friends; there would only be a few of our friends there.

But canceling the wedding at this point, with the invitations already mailed, would be embarrassing. Eloping would have greatly disappointed my future mother-in-law. I suppose I could have moved the wedding to my fiancé’s home town, but then I would have had to explain to his family why we were moving the wedding at the last minute.

I didn’t want anybody to know that my mother treated me like that. I didn’t want to admit that at 25 and independent, I still turned into 15 around my mom. And as tempting a thought as it was, as much as I wanted to cut myself off from my parents right then, I wasn’t willing to walk away from my family.

So I complied. I didn’t spend the night at my boyfriend’s apartment. I was there to answer the phone. Another truce was achieved.

I did get married, exactly as planned. My father-in-law, an ordained but not practicing Methodist minister, performed the ceremony in my parents’ Baptist church. It was a simple, Southern wedding; no wedding dinner, just cake and punch, no dancing, just standing around and talking at the reception. I enjoyed my friends, and I was happy and relaxed. The blowup with my mom was not forgotten nor forgiven, but it wasn’t going to ruin the day; I’m a Southern woman, I can ignore things with the best of them.

I still look back and wondered whether I should have called her bluff, stood up to her back then. I don’t know what would have happened, and it seemed unfair to drag my sweet, gentle husband into that mess then. Besides, I thought then that it wouldn’t happen again, that my being married would change things. It did change things; my mother made it clear that I was now “his problem”, not hers. But the real problem is that my very different life is threatening to her, and that’s not going to change, and so it was inevitable that there would be more blowups.

Fortunately, I married a good guy, Southern enough to understand me, but not so Southern as to need or want to stay in the South. Three thousand miles is a good distance for me.