in which I have a hard choice to make, and there is mention of a camel

Picking up right where we left off – I talked to my mother again after I wrote the last post, and she was comforting and helpful and, well, wonderful. She didn’t give me any advice I could use, but she wasn’t talking crazy and saying exactly what I didn’t want to hear, like the first conversation.

The public interest in this whole affair seems to have dropped off the map, so I won’t post Dad’s email. But it said, among other things:

-that it was my fault he’d never met BF’s family,
-that I viewed him as an ATM and never said thank you for his monetary support,
-that just because my wedding is important to me doesn’t mean it’s important to him,
-that he would pay for my wedding if he can control where, when, the guest list, and every other aspect of it,
-that he’s “beyond caring” – either about me or about how he behaves around me, I’m not sure which,
-that neither I nor my mother has ever really seen his “cruel side” (this felt like a threat to me),
-that NW is “on my side” about this and wants him to change his mind.

And this was somehow supposed to be a point-by-point response to my letter. Except I mentioned my mother exactly once, in a peripheral way, and she was everywhere in his reply, an email so bitter I could taste lemon.

So I’ve had enough. I don’t deserve to be treated this way, by my father or anyone else. I wrote him back this morning, in as neutral a tone as I could manage, and told him I was sorry that he felt the way he did. I asked him to remember 1) that I always say what I mean, unlike whoever he might have been thinking of when he read my letter*, and 2) reiteratively, that it is his choice to not attend my wedding and no one but him is responsible for it. I wanted this second point to be absolutely clear, so there can be no unfair blaming in the future. I also apologized for not writing him more letters when he was on deployments when I was a kid, which is something I have regretted painfully for many years.

*He was thinking of my mother, who never ever says what she means. Part of the reason I feel resigned about this situation is that I think, because of this email and various other evidence, that he associates me almost totally with her, having lost the thread somewhere that I am not her and never have been. I will never have a relationship with any kind of normality with him as long as he sees her in me, because he will continue to resent me and treat me like a greyhound who’s lost one too many races.

I have decided to slap a ton of insurance on the Degas sketch and take it to the UPS store to ship to him. Seeing it on my wall is too tempting, and too painful, and I hope he gets at least some kind of message when he sees that I’ve sent him back something so valuable. I consider our relationship on indefinite hiatus, and I don’t intend to resume it until I get an apology. I am owed an apology. At least.

Mom said that Dad’s acting this way because he feels left out, and there’s nothing that makes him act more like a wounded animal. It’s possible that he’s been feeling left out of my life for a lot of years now, but relationships work both ways, and it’s at least as much his fault as mine. And I’m not sure how to include him better in my wedding; it’s…my wedding, and if he doesn’t like the details of it, he can suck it, which is an invitation that I’ll issue (in more polite ways than that) to anybody who’s telling me what I should do and not do for this day.

Also, I’m not making any excuses for him. This email was raving, angry, and in a number of places disconnected from me altogether. He needs to figure out how to parent an adult, or possibly how to be an adult himself, and I’m not going to sit around and take abuse until he does.

I know I sound angry and a little immature about all this, but that’s how I feel. Maybe one day I’ll look back and understand a little better why he acted this way, and how I could have greased and accommodated and wheedled so as not to drive the wedge further between us, and so on, but for the moment he’s just…gone too far. He’s put too many straws on the back of this particular camel at this particular moment in history.

Your opinions are welcome.

–

In other wedding news (because, truly, there isn’t much in my mental space right now that isn’t run over by the train of WEDDING), it turns out that what I’d thought was going to be waaaaaaay too expensive to do in my favorite place in the world is literally a tenth of the cost I thought it was going to be. BF’s parents came over for dinner the other night, and while the purpose of this dinner was to ask them if they’d help with paying for the wedding (they will, although they won’t know how much for another month or so, but this is a giant relief for me and BF), I also found out that renting the Hall of Philosophy in Chautauqua for a ceremony only costs $800. I thought it’d be thousands. The reception and everything would still eat up our budget nicely, but…I think this option might be better than Las Vegas.

It’s on the east coast, for one thing, which will make the lion’s share of our guests have to do a lot less traveling. I don’t think the travel costs or hotel costs would end up being much cheaper, but things would generally be a bit easier. There isn’t anything else to do in Chautauqua, unlike Vegas, but it’s a beautiful, pastoral place, with the best energy of anywhere I’ve ever been. I think our guests would enjoy it (except MB, who can’t stand it there, but he is so happy we’re getting married that I think he’ll be OK), and it would be less of a burden on them to ask them to travel to upstate New York than Nevada.

Also? I love this place. More than pretty much anything except BF I love this place. Being married there would be a dream. I’d just ruled it out (mostly) because I thought it would be too expensive, and that getting everything in the gates (…long story) would be too much of a pain in the ass. Vegas sounded exciting, and I loved the thought of telling people I was getting married there, or that I got married there, but that it was an elegant and wonderful wedding. Now that I know Chautauqua is not at all unreasonable to imagine, because I was dead wrong about certain aspects of it, I don’t really know what to do.

Because I’d have to plan it myself, is the problem. I wouldn’t use a wedding planner; on this coast it would be too expensive. And in my heart of hearts I do not want to plan a wedding from scratch. I want to have someone else do the legwork of the caterers and the photographer and the florist and the aaaaaaaghh no. I’m willing to make decisions about what I want, and to show up for tastings, but I do not want to haggle and I do not want to make 900 phone calls.

So a big decision is before me. I told the Vegas planner to put her work on hold for now, because I need to take a couple of weeks and decide what I want to do. The Chautauqua wedding would be in September, probably, rather than the spring, and BF would be 30. I had kind of hoped to tie the knot while both of us were in our twenties, for some reason I do not consciously know or understand, but if Chautauqua is our better option I guess I don’t really care about that. Vegas is a much more selfish option, because it’ll be a lot more fun for me and a lot more of a hassle for our guests. But Chautauqua is where I’ve secretly wanted to get married since June of 2008, when I saw a wedding party walking to the Athenaeum behind a horse-drawn carriage with the bride and groom in it.

(I don’t want the carriage, myself, but apparently it’s thrown in with the whole package.)

Your opinions are welcome on that, too.

You know, I think I’ll write a post explaining Chautauqua at some point soon. It’s hard to figure out what the heck it is without someone telling you in a couple thousand words, or without going there yourself. I’m not a fan of talking about it too much here, because there are a limited number of people who spend time there and I’m that much closer to getting dooced, but if I’m going to have my wedding there I want my blog-friends to know why it’s just as good as, if not better than, Vegas.

There really isn’t much else going on. I’m sleeping well about half the nights, trying to run my life around a new job and all this wedding and family stress. BF is a rock, but he’s also in the middle of finishing the game, which ships in the fall, so he’s stressed out too. It’s just a hard time. Lousy Smarch.