The Happiest Day of Your Life

Today, I was talking to a very good friend of mine who is about to give birth any day now. She told me that she had gotten a super cute hair cut today and she joked that she was now well prepared for the baby to arrive. The baby should try and be born tonight because her hair would look hot.

"That's important," I remarked. "Got to look good for the post-birth pics."

We continued in this vein until I suggested that she might want to get a Brazilian bikini wax for the big day.

Shockingly, she did not think that was a good idea.

"Come on!" I insisted. "Where's your commitment to looking good on THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF YOUR LIFE?"

And that's when I realized why the day your first child is born isn't the most important day of your life. It can't be. Because come on. There's a whole industry around looking good for this MOST IMPORTANT DAY, and even as masochistic as we women can be, most of us aren't going to agree to some waxing at 39 weeks.

A Sustainable Wedding?

I've been reflecting a lot on weddings and eco-weddings, and what it means to throw a "sustainable wedding" or what the hell that phrase means in the first place.

Weddings are ... difficult. For me, the past month has meant realizing more fully than I had ever truly realized how a wedding really isn't about me. I know, Modern Bride might beg to differ, but it's not just MY special day. It's a lot of people's special day, including, of course, the groom. And those people also have opinions about what the wedding should look like. Especially the groom.

I had ideas about what I wanted my wedding to look like, and I had to pretty much toss them out the window immediately. A lot of my friends (who like me, tend to run pretty indie and eco) incorporated a bunch of Do It Yourself projects into their weddings. In my head, I liked the idea of setting up the wedding with friends and family. But I'm not very crafty, my family is not really a "DIY" family, and we're having a fairly large wedding. DIY ain't happening here.

So, fine, I thought. I have always said that you don't have to be a cowboy, you don't have to do things yourself. Living sustainably can also involve hiring others who share your values. Maybe I can hire a "green caterer" or a "green florist." We can do email save the dates, or maybe not do them at all.

And maybe we will do those things. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we will be constrained by our budget and won't be able to afford the "green caterer," or maybe our attempts to be eco will end up saving us money.

I just don't know, and to a certain extent, I have to let it go.

In a lot of ways, I think weddings are inherently unsustainable from an environmental perspective. They are big shindigs that typically involve a lot of traveling by a multitude of people. It's a lot of money, a lot of energy, a lot of hassle, a lot of stress, a lot of crying. For what generally amounts to ONE DAY.

On the other hand, weddings are sustaining. Not just for one couple, but for entire communities. Weddings are our way of saying together as a community, "Yes. We're here for you. We love you. We're with you."

Look. We're inviting people from four different continents to our wedding (pretty sure there's no one from Africa or Australia on our lists, though I could be wrong.) I don't know if all those far away people are going to travel, but it's probable that some will. And the uptight crazy eco-nut that still exists inside of me to remonstrate when I do things like use paper towels or sleep in and drive to work feels pretty bad about all the energy that will be consumed so people can come to my wedding.

But the rest of me can't get too worked up about it.

I read a post somewhere about someone's wedding (vague I know, if anyone has any idea where the following came from let me know) where they talked about the oft given advice to not invite anyone to the wedding who you weren't sure you would be friends with in three years. And they said that that advice ignored the fact that some people WOULD be your friends in three years BECAUSE you invited them to your wedding.

There are few events where all the people you love make a point to gather in one room, and weddings are one of those select few events. And at the end of the day, that's what it's about for us. It's not about the chairs or the music or the cake or the invitations (though we have opinions on all those things), it's about the people.

So.

I'd like to promise to myself right now, here on this blog, to keep that in mind for the next several months. That, at the end of the day, our wedding is about us, our friends, our family, and our joined community. And as long as I keep remembering that I know, that while our wedding might not the most environmentally sustainable thing in the world, it will be emotionally sustainable. And that's what matters most to me.

So This Happened....

Yup. I am now an engaged woman. The whole engagement thing was totally perfect. My boyfriend, now fiance (except I hate that word ... can I call him my pre-husband?) surprised me totally and completely, which is hard to do, especially when we had been out ring shopping the week before. Suffice it to say, we are both pretty darn happy.

I've always had mixed feelings about the whole engagement thing. Back when I was single and the whole engagement thing was completely theoretical, I wrote this post about the ring dilemma. The post was one of my most popular posts ever, and the comments are still some of my favorite on this blog. Everyone seemed to do something different, and yet everything that people did, traditional or no, was so lovely and special.

Still, when it came time for me to get engaged, I had misgivings. After all, I spent a year as a non-consumer and an engagement ring seemed, in many ways, to be a wasteful extravagance. I love rings. I love jewelry. I adore other people's engagement rings. And yes, I'm going to be honest, I secretly DID want one myself. However, I also do like to live by my principles and sometimes that means saying no to yourself especially in our consumer-driven culture.

My pre-husband, on the other hand, felt pretty strongly about it. And what he felt was that he wanted to get me a ring. After some half-hearted negotiation (Are you sure you don't want to get me an engagement mattress? What about an engagement trip to Detroit for Thanksgiving?) I agreed to the ring. And so I set about finding a ring that I would love and that would also fit in with my principles.

There are an increasing number of options available in the "green engagement ring" category and it took a while for me to sort through my options and figure out what was right for me.

Conflict free diamonds (such as the Canadian diamonds offered at Brilliant Earth) are a nice option for those wanting to avoid blood diamonds (and come on, who really wants a blood diamond, no matter how beautiful it is?) But, even conflict-free diamonds do have to be mined, and any mining process is going to have some environmental impact.

I flirted with synthetic diamonds for a while too. But once again, synthetic diamonds have some impact, even if it's less than that of a mined diamond.

In the end, the choice I made for myself made the most sense given my history. I chose a used diamond ring ... or in fancy terms "vintage." The ring is estimated to be from the 1940s, and although I don't really know the history, I can make it up. Maybe my ring belonged to the bride of a World War II vet. Maybe they wrote impossibly beautiful letters to each other during the war. Maybe their letters were totally boring: "Dear Barbara: France is hot. Love Ralph." Maybe Barbara worked in the war factories. Maybe Ralph almost died. Maybe they had a long and beautiful fifty plus years of marriage. I don't really know, but I like the idea that my ring has a story to tell if only I could hear it speak. Point being, I love my ring. Also, it's super shiny! I'm getting a little distracted right now looking at it.

The past couple weeks have been total engagement bliss. We've been lucky enough to get to celebrate with many of our friends and family members over the past few weeks, and it's served as a reminder that we're not just marrying each other, we are marrying each other's communities. And I have to say, I think we both lucked out in that we are both marrying amazing communities of people. I feel completely confident that I am READY for marriage.

A wedding, on the other hand, is a total different ball game. But that's the subject of another post.