Annette Byford - A Wedding In The Family: Mothers Tell Their Stories Of Joy, Conflict and Loss

A Wedding in the Family

Mothers tell their stories of joy, conflict and loss

Annette Byford

First published in 2019 by

Ortus Press, an imprint of Free Association Books

Copyright Annette Byford 2019

The authors rights are fully asserted. The rights of

Annette Byford to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP Catalogue of this book is available from

the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-91138-320-8

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To all the mothers who generously shared their experiences with me

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional of female choices, is not a sanctuary:

it is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Margaret Drabble

Contents

M y daughter got married a couple of years ago. There was period of about a year between her engagement and the wedding during which we all seemed to enter a parallel universe, the rules of which were confusing and strange to me. I was not entirely sure that I understood what exactly was expected of me, but at the same time it was clear that it was possible to get something wrong. I spoke a great deal with other women in my situation and realised that there was nothing unusual about my own experience and that many other women shared the slight sense of bewilderment around this event and their own reaction to it. Nearly all the women I spoke with informally referred to a sense of confusion around the rules of what was expected of them and of a sense of surprise at the strength of feelings, whether positive or negative, happy or sad, excited or disappointed, aroused by various aspects of the wedding and its unfolding preparations. A formulation I often heard and which seemed to sum up this slightly bewildered, at times amused, at times exasperated, surprise was What was that all about? regarding their own reactions and those of people closely involved. This is broadly speaking the question this book is concerned with: what IS it indeed about and what are the reasons for our own reactions in the context of weddings that seem to take us by surprise?

Participants of weddings agree that already the build-up to a wedding tends to turn into an experience that is characterised by strong emotions and unexpected pressures and tensions. Most people have tales to tell about friends and family reacting to seemingly innocuous aspects of the planning with an intensity which does not always make immediate sense to the observer or even to the people having the reactions. Old family conflicts that had been long forgotten may resurface. Emotions may run high and sometimes it seems as if the prospect of the wedding puts a magnifying glass to existing relationships, styles of interaction and communication.

In my conversations with mothers of brides and grooms, at first informally and then formally in a series of interviews which form the main part of this book, I noticed how being in the inner circle of a wedding gives you access to a world that you may not have been aware of and that may not even have held any particular interest for you. It is like buying a house or having a baby, taking a child to university or moving an elderly parent from their house to a different smaller residence, or losing a parent: all these are different rites of passage in a persons or a familys life. You are aware other people around you are going through this and have been going through this, but you only get access to the more intimate details when it is your turn. Then you are welcomed into a community which is eager to talk and share its experience. Whilst the weddings I heard about were different, and there were tales of easy and not so easy weddings, certain themes began to emerge that seemed present for nearly every woman I spoke with. Whichever way a particular wedding and its preparation unfolded, there were certain areas that practically lit up when we approached them. All mothers agreed the wedding was about the young couple making a commitment to each other and the wedding was going to be a public celebration of that. However, the wedding also brought into view a complicated network of other relationships, some of them reaching far back like the earlier relationship between mother and child, but also between mothers and their own brothers, sisters, parents and friends. Others were relatively new, like the relationship with the new son-in-law or daughter-in-law and with their respective families. Clearly all of them were emotionally charged and not all of them uncomplicated by any means. Past, present and future were going to come together in one big party!

What complicates things further it seems is the fact that the rules of the game have changed. If even a generation ago the expectations about how to conduct a wedding were shared widely and a protocol existed that was on the whole observed, such as expectations that governed which family was to host and finance the wedding and which roles various members of the families took, this is not the case anymore. Mothers were often a bit at a loss to know quite what they were expected or indeed allowed to do. Very few of the mothers expected to be in charge of the wedding (many of them had already opted out of a formal wedding for themselves), but where there may have been either relief or to the contrary, perhaps disappointment at their diminished role, what I found more often was confusion and a fear of getting something wrong. It was not immediately clear why this fear was quite so strong and why the consequences of getting it wrong took on such a heavy weight.

The rollercoaster that precedes a wedding forms part of popular folklore; wedding stories are everywhere: in magazines, on TV and in films. TV reality shows such as Dont tell the bride are frequently repeated and you could watch an episode every day of the week, if you wanted to. The premise of this series is interesting, in that it plays over and over again with the theme of expectations, disappointed and/or fulfilled, involving a whole cast of family and friends trying to make this a fairy-tale wedding that will make the bride happy. As observers, we are invited to enjoy the potential for disaster and then in the end its resolution. Whole magazines are devoted to the preparation for the big day and weddings are becoming bigger and more expensive, driven by an ever-growing industry.

However, when I started looking for more systematic research into the subject, I was surprised to find very little. Psychological exploration of processes involved in families and their experiences of weddings are virtually non-existent, whilst on the other hand pop psychology advice in magazines and websites on how to handle the stress of weddings is extensive. In this advice the idea of the perfect wedding day is essentially confirmed: if only certain rules are observed, then there will not be any conflict nor will there be any difficult feelings. It will indeed all be perfect.

Is this really on offer though? With the average wedding now costing 30,000 and the wedding industry creating ever more elaborate suggestions about what has to be part of a successful wedding event, the pressures on the couple and their families are huge. The cultural fantasy of the dream wedding, a mixture of tradition, celebrity and fairy-tale imagery, encouraged and sold by the wedding industry, leaves families struggling with a potential clash between expectation and reality.