How I Planned Your Wedding by Susan Wiggs Page B

claws of control a wee bit.
    My mom and I both believe that we are unquestionably correct, all the time, and that we are each cornucopias of mind-blowingly good ideas, the likes of which most other people would kill for. So you can imagine what it’s like when we disagree.
    The concept of being wrong is, for me, the same as thinking about my parents’ sex life: I prefer not to imagine it and when I do, it makes me shudder. Ack, did that make you think about your own parents in the sack? Gross. Let’s try another analogy: for me (and my mother, actually), wrongness is like the square root of negative one: it simply doesn’t exist.
    So there we were, two days after Dave had proposed to me, having our very first mother-daughter wedding fight while our king crab omelets turned cold and rubbery.
    Dave and my dad, meanwhile, sat agog at the table, the blood slowly draining from their faces and their eyes growing to the size of saucers. They were beginning to realize that allowing my mom and me to plan the wedding together would be like putting two wet cats into a potato sack. One of the men—I don’t remember which because I was seething with fury by the time this happened—eventually suggested that we not make any decisions about our wedding party until we thought more about what kind of wedding Dave and I were going to have.
    “It doesn’t change the fact that cousins should be bridesmaids before the people you get drunk with every weekend, Elizabeth,” my mother griped.
    “It also doesn’t change the fact that this is my wedding and I can do it however I like and I don’t care what you say,” I snapped back.
    Good lord, we were really on our game, weren’t we?
    But we got over it. That’s the good thing about my mom and me: we can fight like, well, two wet cats in a potato sack, but the next time we talk, we’re back to being best friends again.
    Ultimately, the bridesmaid choice wasn’t really about who put on the matching dresses and dyed shoes. It was about the meaning attached to the gesture. For my mom, it was all about family. For me, it was about the bond of friendship. Our job was to figure out how to give us both what we wanted, not to win an argument. So I did something my touchy-feely liberal arts education taught me: I found a creative solution.
    A few weeks and a couple of thousand internet searches later, I found the answer to my bridesmaid woes—the junior bridesmaid. Who knew?
    According to Wikipedia, A junior bridesmaid is a girl who is clearly too young to be marriageable, but who is included as an honorary bridesmaid. Further digging online taught me that junior bridesmaids are treated much the same as regular bridesmaids, but with the understanding that their role carries fewer responsibilities. And fewer tequila slammers.
    With Dave holding my hand for support, I called my mom to tell her my idea: my younger female cousins would be included in the wedding as junior bridesmaids, walking down the aisle at the head of the wedding party, and then sitting with the family through the ceremony. I also gave them the special job of carrying single white flowers to give to our mothers and grandmothers as they reached the altar.
    By golly, my mom snapped that idea right up, and before she could obsess over it for another second, I called up my aunt and told her the news.
    Mommy had one thing right: they were overjoyed. They happily and sweetly embraced their roles. On the wedding day, the two girls showed up at the bridal suite with their hair perfectly styled, their makeup carefully done, their angelic faces wreathed in smiles. They added something so special to the occasion that now I can’t imagine doing it any other way. It was exactly the right choice to include them in my wedding party.
    I just wish I had kept my trap shut when my mom first proposed the idea of having them as bridesmaids.
    Now that I had my two junior bridesmaids and my maid of honor in place, that left an unidentified number