Would You Be My…Should You Be My
Mauve. Cranberry red…Maybe more maroon. Definitely forest green. Maybe a splash of gold. My bestie, your bestie, your brother, your sister… Hmm. I had been having so much fun planning bridal attire. Before I got engaged, I had imagined that I wouldn’t have a bridal party. I don’t have a ton of people that I feel that close to and it just seemed easier to plan–one less thing for me to worry about. My fiance, on the other hand, is close to a plethora of people and has a large close-knit family. For her, having her loved ones at her side was essential. How could she have a bridal party and not me?
I got to thinking. If I had a bridal party, who would I include? While I have lots of friends that are fun to hang out with or chat it up with, it was hard for me to list out people that I felt I could really rely on. After all, my bridal party would have to be there to make my special day more enjoyable–not cause me more stress. I decided to include my few closest friends and my brother. I didn’t want too many people and four seemed like a manageable amount of people to be responsible for.
Once I made up my mind and finalized who I was going to ask, I began planning my bridal party proposal. I love giving people gifts and the bridal party proposal box trend that I’ve been seeing for a while now seemed right up my alley. I really wanted my squad to feel special and spoiled. I began shopping for my items and getting everything together. As the time began approaching for me to ask them, I was hit with a wave of depression. Over the past few years, a lot of unresolved feelings from my childhood have begun to surface as I’ve been on my journey to healing my traumas.
I was sitting there thinking about how excited I was to ask my friends to be in my bridal party and the little speech that I was going to give and I started to feel sad. How could I be fake about my own bridal party? My brother and I aren’t super close, we don’t talk to each other about our problems, and when we are going through things we don’t lean on one another. I began having doubts. I was sad that all of the above wasn’t true. I wished that we were more like best friends, but in reality, we were pretty absent from each other’s lives. Neither of us really grew up speaking about our feelings or knowing how to confide in each other and that continued as we got older, especially because my brother is much more reserved than I am.
I couldn’t stop crying. My entire life, I had imagined that my brother would be up there at my side–at times I had even imagined that maybe he would be my best man. Growing up, he and I always spent a ton of time together. I was his tagalong little sister that would go everywhere with him. As a kid, I thought that that meant that we were close, but as I got older I realized that I wasn’t really around because he wanted me to be, but because I kind of had to be. The realization made me feel lonely, and deeply rooted feelings of unworthiness and loneliness took over.
I cried to my fiance, explaining how I was feeling and expressing my confusion and hurt over the situation at hand. As she does, she helped me see another perspective: that despite our relationship not being the way I want it to be in an ideal world, we still love each other, and nine times out of ten, he shows up when I extend an olive branch. While this relationship and all of its nuances are still hard for me to manage, I’m glad that I included my brother and I’m sure that in his own way, he’s excited, too. Going through this made me realize that choosing a bridal party is not all that fun. It can be a tedious and emotional process that brings up a lot of feelings as you evaluate the value of your friendships and relationships with family members. However, it was slightly healing to release those chained-up emotions. Q
