Tiffany at Skip Barber driving school.

Several years ago when a friend of mine was getting married, I gave her a call the week before her wedding to see how things were going. She said there was so much to tell and asked what I wanted to hear about. I asked, “Well, what’s the most exciting part?” She immediately replied, “The dress,” and then told me all about her gown.

An undeniable truth of wedding planning is that dress shopping is the best part. Even my Skip Barber-trained Tiffany has given in to being a girly girl when trying on gowns. If you know Tiffany—or have read my other blog posts—you’ll understand that I had concerns about getting her into a dress. But wedding gowns have a magic all their own, and Tiffany has fallen under the spell.

Tiffany with her brother, Wylie, last year at the aquarium in North Carolina.

When Tiffany was first engaged this spring, she said it would be a May 2010 wedding. Perfect, I thought. That’s plenty of time for planning. But within a few weeks of the engagement, the couple decided they wanted to aim for a May 2009 celebration. In that case, we needed to get busy!

After several weeks of visiting prospective locations, not a single one has been right. Are we too picky? Unrealistic? Why is the right place so hard to find? What’s missing? Tiffany and Mike have a few requirements, naturally, but nothing that’s outrageous. They have a first choice for the date but are willing to be flexible for the right place. They prefer to have the ceremony and reception at the same site to save guests from possibly getting lost. They’d like an outside ceremony, but the location must allow for a plan B in case the weather isn’t favorable. Above all, it has to feel right. The location has to be reflective of Mike and Tiffany as a couple. It has to suit them and meet the logistical requirements.

In a single week, we scouted three vineyards, three county sites, two restaurants, two manors, and a community center. It was our busiest week, but there have been several other site visits, and Tiffany has been to just as many on her own.

I nervously introduced myself: “Hi. My name is Amanda, and I’m a mother of a bride.” A chorus of sympathetic voices answered, “Hi, Amanda.” Okay, so it hasn’t come to that, but if I don’t find some consistent, practical advice soon, I’ll be the founding member of Mother of the Bride Support (MOBS).

The sources for wedding advice are endless, including magazines, Web sites, TV shows, books, and of course, the trusty family and friends. The volume and breadth of advice is not an issue. My problem has been that I keep finding contradictory advice. Are weddings the Wild West of event planning?

The business of weddings is an industry of its own. Never mind the actual vendors, services, and hospitality industries available—consider the advertising, Web sites, and publications selling the dream to the brides. It’s overwhelming! Off the top of my head, I can think of four movies that have come out in the last decade that are centered around weddings. The Friends TV series had at least three weddings that I can recall. We love weddings—they’re life-affirming celebrations of love and hope. What better event to build an industry around?

Tiffany and her fiancé, Mike.

I was talking to my daughter, Tiffany, after work one evening in early spring when she said, “Can I come over?” Duh, of course you can come over. But it did alarm me because with her busy schedule, I usually have to plan time with her weeks in advance. Or, if I really just need a “fix,” I can drop by her work for a quick hello. But a spur-of-the-moment pop-over is not typical.

When she came over, she told me the various “signs” she had seen that her boyfriend was going to propose. She had overheard a comment from a friend—“Let me know if you need help picking out the ring.” Something had arrived in the mail from a local jeweler. They had a weekend away planned for their upcoming anniversary. She told me all this as if she had been trying to ignore the signs—not because she didn’t want him to propose but because she knew it was supposed to be a surprise. But clearly she wanted to talk about it. She didn’t have doubts, but I could tell she needed to process the whole thing.

So I asked her if she loved him and wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. She nodded. “Your whole life,” I emphasized. Yes. So I asked her, “Well, what would you say if he asked you to marry him today?” This may have been a more direct way of facing “the question” than she had actually considered. She crinkled up her nose, pulled her shoulders up, and said, “I wouldn’t say no.” I think she just didn’t want her mom to be the one she said yes to and so phrased it so as not to give me “the answer.” 

The author, right, with her daughter, the bride-to-be.

Little girls dream of their wedding day. But moms also dream of their little girl’s wedding day. When I found out my daughter was going to be engaged, I already had my own vision of what she would look like as a bride. That vision is not far off (in my mind) from how she looked as a flower girl when she was four years old. As it turns out, my vision of my daughter as a bride differs from my daughter’s vision of herself as a bride.

My daughter’s boyfriend asked my husband and me for our blessing a few weeks before he proposed. He brought the ring and showed it to us. He told us, “I love her to death—she’s the one.” He also told us he hadn’t been sleeping very well the previous few nights in anticipation of talking to us. Although my daughter had expressed her suspicions that he was going to propose, I couldn’t talk to her about it until it was “official.” So, to avoid letting anything slip, I didn’t talk to her much during those interim weeks.

As a flower girl she wore a white dress, ballet slippers, and baby’s breath in her hair, and my view of her as a bride is a grown-up version of that. I picture her wedding dress as a super-fancy sundress, tea length, with a scalloped hem. I see her being barefoot and think her hair should be down in loose ringlets with flowers in it. Oh, and the intimate ceremony should be in a field under the shade of a big tree—something like the tree in Forrest Gump.