wedding | Mary J. McCoy-Dressel Books

Week 52: Wedding Disaster.

To quote: How time flies when we’re having fun. Isn’t this the truth? We’re coming up on our last week of 2018 and the fifty-second week in Marketing for Romance Writers 52-Week Blog Challenge Blog Hop. #MFRWauthor. How about that! Let’s have a party and hope it doesn’t lead up to a disastrous wedding reception.

This week’s topic doesn’t much apply to me in the true sense of disaster.

My first wedding wasn’t a disaster, but it put a black cloud over our wedding day. Our only guests at the wedding ceremony, besides my close friends, were my family. That’s right. None of my in-laws came to our little church wedding except his oldest brother’s wife. She and I had become good friends in the year and a half prior to our wedding.

My family and friends sat on one side of the church. The other side remained lonely. The reverend asked if we wanted to wait until his family arrived. I don’t know how my fiancé felt that day without them there, but his stubbornness in this matter distressed me. But hey, he wore cowboy boots to our wedding! How could I be upset with him? ❤ Ha-Ha. (His were black.)

Backing up here a little, I’ll explain and give a little history. My husband hadn’t invited his mom and dad because they had been on bad terms for a long time—especially with his mother. Without knowing me, she put me in the same category as his ex-wife, which wasn’t good in her eyes. She’d left him and kept the kids hidden from him. His mom didn’t want to see him get hurt again, which I can understand, but she judged me in advance. When I met him, his ex had already been gone two years, and I understand he had gone through hell for a lot of that time. His daughters found him over thirty years later.

His mom’s attitude added to my husband’s animosity toward her, so they didn’t receive an invitation. Before we married, we lived together, and she might’ve come over three times to bitch at him—ignoring me each time as if I wasn’t there. My father-in-law used to sneak over at night and didn’t have any problems getting to know me.

My husband left it up to his brothers to attend our wedding or not. They chose not to. However, his brothers and I had grown close over the time he and I went together prior to our wedding. I understood they didn’t want to get on their mom’s bad side, but it hurt. They did come to the “after party” at our house.

My cake was similar to this two-layer with an additional small top layer. The lace on the middle layer matches the lace covering my short wedding dress. I remember seeing my dad walking into my house carrying the cake so carefully! Normally, when my dad came to visit, he’d be in and out in a rush, but at our little party, I didn’t think he’d ever leave!

Eventually my mother-in-law came around and things were great between us. She gave me her family recipes. She and my husband had reconciled not long after our wedding. I was pregnant with my second child when she passed away at the young age of fifty-seven. It shook up the whole family, and I’m glad we got to know each other and had enjoyed good years together.

Other participants in this blog hop can be found HERE.

It’s been fun for me to be a participant in this blog challenge for the past two years. I’ve communicated with authors I never would have met outside of this challenge other than maybe through a couple writer’s groups we may share like the #MFRWauthor Yahoo marketing group. I don’t know what the future holds for this blog challenge, but I’m glad I joined in and wrote on the topics and weeks that I could. Cheers to the authors who participated each week and to those of us who did our best.