My mom was so desperate to find out who paid for Friday night’s family dinner that she had to call me from the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses during one of her preaching outings with a worshiping friend. She couldn’t even wait until she got home to call me. She tried to delay it a lot by asking things like who actually showed up, what we ordered, how long we were out. And of course, the standard question finally came, “So who paid the bill?” I told her that my cousin paid the majority of it, my cousin’s wife’s sister paid a small portion, and I paid the rest. Then she annoyingly asked, “Russell didn’t pay the whole bill?” And then “Ellen and her husband didn’t even offer?” Notice how those questions are framed: in a negative, why-did-it-end-up-this-way-and-why-did-you-have-to-pay-at-all? – type way. It’s always negative, and it’s always as though she or I have been slighted. I didn’t feel slighted. I expected to pay a portion of the bill. I don’t like visitors paying unless they are staying for an extended time. She still doesn’t seem to understand this concept, so I have to reiterate it to her. Over and over again. My friend suggested to me to not tell her at all the result because it simply just does not matter (which it really doesn’t, and I agree), but I have a feeling that would result in far more nagging than I can tolerate.

I always knew that at some point, I’d probably butt heads with at least one or both of my parents-in-law. It couldn’t always be so bright and shiny, right? I couldn’t always see them as so great and warm and practically perfect. Something had to go wrong at some point. And how fitting that that “some point” has to be during wedding planning.

My mother-in-law had the brilliant idea to check to see what wedding invitation printing would cost in Chennai during her trip there to visit her mother, and given how expensive it is here overall despite discount codes and even my cousin’s employee credit for a high quality printing company, we decided to take her up on her offer because it would still be pretty expensive. However, doing this required my mother-in-law to be the “middle woman,” and me to write extremely detailed notes regarding what I was looking for regarding everything from font types for certain text, actual invitation and insert card text, envelope and invitation paper colors, to actual design. I wrote instructions on everything from font type for headers versus font type for regular text, to even the actual punctuation marks and how I wanted them to look. I thought I was doing her a favor for being so detail-oriented because that’s what she requested. And somehow, this backfired on me.

I guess my “details” weren’t received very well because there were mistakes made from missing or added punctuation, wrong header font, to even a missing word, which ended up driving me crazy today when I saw the finished (and fully printed – all 105 of them) product. I went back three times to look at the final wording I sent, and I just couldn’t understand how it was not printed like what I wrote to the T. It was very explicit — how did this go wrong? The most frustrating part about it was I actually caught a typo on the actual invitation days ago, and I pointed it out over Whatsapp to her. She got defensive and was very hesitant to call the printer to ask them to make that one small adjustment. I kept going on and on about it, insisting it needed to be fixed, and finally she relented on that one change. With the new typo I discovered today, not only did she say it was not possible at this point to change, but she actually went ahead and said that the text on the insert was exactly as I wrote in the e-mail — I was flabbergasted. Now, I was a liar?

Since the mistake is on the insert card, I’m not as concerned about it and will very likely let it go, but it’s more the principle of it that annoys me. I was asked to give very detailed instructions on what I wanted. I did that. And in the end, not only is it not followed, but I’m told it *was* followed and there are insinuations around my being overly anal and accusatory. And this is coming from someone who I thought was anal (this is someone who followed me around her kitchen every Christmas the last three years, wiping up tiny droplets of water or batter bits I’d leave behind on her kitchen counter within seconds after they’d appeared. Hey, I was going to wipe them up at the end of my cooking, but what can I do when someone else is hell-bent on it being done straight away?). Chris’s dad was not helping in this matter as he insisted the errors were not a big deal, but he only brought up the errors that I had already stated I was willing to gloss over.

Anyone who knows me at all knows I am extremely attentive to detail, and when I give instructions, I want it followed exactly. I’d do the same if I had a job as important as writing out someone’s wedding invitations. In fact, when I created my best friend’s bridal shower invitations, I re-read the text over 15 times before I actually hit “Submit” and purchased them. I read the text forwards, backwards, then forwards again, and finally caught a mistake probably the tenth or eleventh time I re-read it. That’s the kind of personality I am when I am dealing with anything writing related. I need someone who is almost as diligent as I am in that regard, otherwise, I rather just do all this myself, which I’ve mostly been doing since the beginning of wedding planning.

And the rest of the stationery for our wedding, whether it’s ceremony programs or menus or even the seating cards — I will be doing all of that myself. If I really want it done right, I will need to do this myself.

My cousin’s cousin who lives in Montreal contacted me today and let me know that she and her family (she has four kids and a husband) are all coming down for vacation to New York beginning tomorrow through Sunday, and they’d like to see me and my cousin in Brooklyn for a meal. I was happy to hear from her even though she’s quite distant family, and I wasn’t able to see her when I was in Montreal last summer. I told my mom she was coming, and as is the typical way my mother reacts when she hears someone is in town, she starts freaking out immediately over the possibility that I could be paying for the dinner bill. How is it that this is the very first thing she has to comment on when I tell her my cousin’s cousin is in town?! She also made sure to ask why she was even coming to town. Well, this may be hard to believe, but they want to actually… vacation in New York City. Is that so shocking?

“I don’t know if you realize this, but you have a wedding coming up, and it’s going to be very expensive, so you shouldn’t be paying for her and her entire family to eat, especially if your cousin and his wife come,” my mom admonished me for the second time (yes, she called me a second time later this evening to tell me again, because clearly I wasn’t really listening the first time we spoke when I left work). “I know you. You’re always so generous. So generous. You always want to pay for everyone.” I do? I didn’t realize that…

“I’m not going to pay for everyone!” I tried to control the volume of my voice. “Stop acting crazy and worrying about something so dumb.”

I also didn’t realize I had a wedding coming up. That is mine. That I have to pay for. Well, that just completely slipped my mind.

So all those thoughts I had yesterday of missing my parents, well, those are gone now. Can you guess why?