Nightmares

When my friend C was planning her wedding she used to always say things to me like “I’m freaking out.” or “I’m waking up in cold sweats.” or “Just elope now while you still want to get married.” or “I’m thinking a lot about killing myself.” I used to sort of chuckle at C, because, let’s be honest, C is no stranger to the concept of hyperbole (she and I have this in common.)

In my head when she would tell me these things, I would always think… silly girl, what could POSSIBLY stress her out this much? She is obviously overreacting. It’s a wedding not a…well, whatever is worse to plan than a wedding. This should be fun! This should be exciting! This should be easy, right? There are only, oh, I don’t know, 8oo thousand checklists of “things to accomplish before the wedding” available out there. Seriously, print one off the interweb, check the little boxes, and call it done. No big deal.

Alas. My comeuppance.

Last night, I had my first wedding planning nightmare. And this is not the figurative “Oh no, what a nightmare!” But the actual tossing turning sweating kind in the middle of the night when you wake up and look around making sure that it wasn’t real. Oh yes, last night was a restless night of bad wedding dreams. (C is laughing at me right now. It’s totally fine. I deserve it.)

Now, I want to go on record as saying that I have no anxiety about marriage…and absolutely NO anxiety about marrying J. I am *very* excited about both of these ideas. No, no, those are the things that SOME people might have wedding anxiety nightmares about. Actual important stuff. But not me! No, my anxiety dream was in two parts: I first dreamed that I forgot to make a hair appointment to do a “test run” of my wedding-do and so instead just walked into a random barber shop hours before the wedding and they shaved my head by accident. And mostly I was pissed because I’d just spent money on a veil that attached with a comb. So part one: cheap bald bride. Outstanding.

Part two: (this is post-middle-of-the-night-wake-up, look-around-the-room, trying to figure out what was going on. Yes, I ACTUALLY fell back into restless sleep/ bad wedding dream part deux) When we get to the wedding, we had accidentally hired some lunatic punk-ass teenager with a boom box to be our wedding deejay (because we found him on Craigslist) and he “forgot” to show up on time for the wedding reception. And when he did show, he was carrying hatboxes and a shoulder mounted stereo circa 1982 (strap and all) all the while smoking a doob filled with the wacky-tobaccy. And so somehow, while we were waiting for him to set up his “equipment”, I (in a complete panic) was trying to rustle up people at the wedding who could sing show tunes to keep everyone occupied (you might think this is the most outlandish part of the dream. It’s actually the most likely event to happen out of both dreams. Hell, I might just do it now for kicks. People will join in. You know who you are.)

The first thing I did this morning, literally the minute after opening my eyes and digesting these little gems was to text C to tell her that I had been inducted into the “Crazy Women Having Wedding Nightmares” club. She texted back in typical C form “Expect more. And they will get worse.” (Ah, the loving support of friends…) I was going to suggest to her that our little club get jackets, but let’s be honest, that’s way too much to be embroidered on the back of a jacket, and CWHWN does not make a good acronym.

I spent most of today trying to figure out where this anxiety came from, as it just seemed so random. I have actually been *off* the wedding planning in the last couple of weeks and hadn’t had any such thoughts cross my mind. So why now? And where was this coming from?

As with all things, I have a theory.

J and I are talking NON-stop right now about his mid-tour leave. We are making all sorts of plans for his ten-ish days at home and counting down the hours until we see one another again (approximately 1600, fyi.) And most of our plans are not fancy or special, but merely consist of just hanging out- just being. Sitting on the couch together having a drink, watching mindless tv in each other’s arms doing nothing. All the stories he hasn’t been able to tell me over the phone, I’m going to get to hear now. And yes, we have some dinner plans and some football plans and some seeing friends plans. But mostly we are just going to *be* together for as long as we can. The idea of non-thinking and only being with him is bliss. It’s what’s keeping me going right now.

However. From a purely time-line standpoint, there are several wedding type details that sorta have to be hammered out while he’s home and we’re together. There’s no getting around the fact that I can do much of this on my own and am glad to do it, but a handful of things have got to be done and discussed, and some major decisions made while he’s home.

I guess my greatest fear is this—I don’t want his leave to become about wedding planning. I don’t want our short time together to be spent doing deejay interviews and cake tastings. I don’t want to have tons of plans and appointments and things that we have to run around to and for. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s probably not on the top of his list of things to do in his short stint at home either.

I think in a way my subliminal nightmare anxiety was about what I was afraid might happen if we totally avoid the wedding-planning topic while he’s home. I’m going to end up bald with a stoned deejay singing show tunes at my own wedding (ok, so probably not. But you get the metaphor.) So maybe the best way to find the balance is by picking ONE day where we set aside x-number of hours and hammer out this wedding stuff, while safeguarding the rest of our time together to just be and not to think. I don’t want our actual wedding planning to become a REAL nightmare for us. But I think that overbooking our leave time together with too many details, (thus making the wedding seem like merely a “task” to be checked off the aforementioned interweb list that I was so ready to advocate) would be the biggest nightmare of all.