The wedding is going to be one of those awesomely warm fuzzy events, not just because it’s full of mushy I Do love stuff, but because I don’t get to see my siblings very often – I’ve never even met my niece, Penny – so this will be our chance to get in some good bonding time. While wearing pinned-on flowers and acting on our best behavior. I snorted while typing that. You just couldn’t hear.

Well, mostly the wedding will be a warm fuzzy. My mother and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms, which should make the whole wedding weekend one big Lifetime Original Movie Starring That Woman From China Beach. Sometime shortly after Christmas, I (totally against my better judgment) let my mom know that I didn’t appreciate her advice. I said I thought her assessment of the situation was incorrect and that she was wrong to butt in. She said F–k you – just like that. Only spelled out in full, with exclamation points and maybe the @ symbol for good measure. I’ve come to expect a certain degree of fall out from disagreeing with the one who birthed me (the last time we dared question motherly love, she took our photos off the mantle put them away in a cardboard box) but this – this is new territory. I won’t lie. I think it’s unhinged. I have never had an argument with anyone that deteriorated into “Screw you!” Ever. A first for everything, I suppose. 

If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you’ll know that things with my mother have always been difficult – in cycles. One, we’re both strong willed. Two, like with my father, there are greater factors at work. My sister, brother and I spent our childhood being parented by two people who were terribly stressed out and suffering from, at times, severe depression. And now that I’m an adult (and I’ll be the first to admit that yes, the following statement makes me feel bad about myself), I’m running out of patience for it. Enough, already. Suicide talk from a parent is truly horrific. And it’s unbelievably disappointing that with all of the available help out there, all the hours of therapy and medication have changed nothing. NOTHING. And I want to know who’s to blame for that.

I’m angry about it. I’m angry that my parents are unstable. That their instability is going to affect their relationships with my future children. That they may not HAVE relationships with my future children. That I find much more comfort in other people’s parents because they behave normally.

My siblings and I spend hours sighing over phone lines, wondering what to do. Yes, accept the people you love for who they are. And then… what? Then don’t have weddings, because you’re tired waging wars on guilt and self pity? Don’t share information or say how you really feel? Oh my god, the amount of truth-avoiding we do! I even do it here – the one place I created to be a more thinking, feeling, expressive person – because I fear the reaction. But not today. I’m done with that crap. This is mine, and I’m taking it back.

My brother was right when he said, “This is the information age, not the feelings-suppression age.”

And today I’m feeling angry.

“House rules?” I raised my eyebrows at him and propped myself up on the couch with my sore elbow, adding a wince to the eyebrow raise. “What house rules would those be?”

“I’m the man of the house and I determine who we root for in the football!”

“The football?”

“You know what I mean.”

What did I care, Saints from Vikings? Absolutely not a bit. But when the latter scored a touchdown to tie up the game yet again, I made the mistake of letting out a, “There ya go!” with just a little too much enthusiasm. Look, I just like a close game. In playoff football – where your (fella’s) team is no longer playing off – it adds the only bit of excitement there is. And excitement I need. See also: tired of football.

“I can’t cheer for Minnesota because they beat Dallas last week?”

“Exactly.”

“But, doesn’t it sound better to say you lost to the dudes going to the Superbowl, rather than just another buncha losers who also lost to the dudes going to the Superbowl?”

“No. We hate the Vikings.”

I shook my head. But I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. If there’s no crying in baseball, there is no reason in football. I mean, after all, this is a sport where we call a 400lb Baby Huey in a jersey an athlete just because he’s too big to be pushed around by actual athletes. Which, really should be the jumping off point for all of my expectations about the game. It’d save a lot of head shaking.

What a scam. Truly. I felt like a horrible trick had been played on me. We were really counting on having to purchase only one ticket for this trip. Alas. I shake my fist at the joke that is award tickets.

So, on the advice of a coworker, I introduced myself to Bing.com. And looky there! I found two round-trip, direct flights to Salt Lake City for about $500. Five hundred dollars is still a chunk o’ change, but with some budget re-adjusting we could do that. Hot dog! I messaged the Dork Lord to confirm the times and sat back feeling rather pleased. But in the time it took him to get back to me (an hour? Less?) the price of the cheapest flights had soard to an unconscionable $900, for the both of us. In what world does that make any sort of sense? Yes, the seat that you wanted to sit in for $250? Well, tick-tock, we decided it’s now worth $450. BECAUSE WE CAN.

I didn’t cry, but I wanted to. You know how life is not fair sometimes? Yeah, not cool. Really not cool.

With a little research, I’ve learned that the cheap fares are released at 12:01AM Wednesdays, after a couple days of price warring by the airlines. Which, I suppose, explains why some of them were still around yesterday at 10AM, and then extinct before noon. So, guess who’s got two thumbs and will be staying up way past her bedtime next Tuesday night? This girl right here.

And if that fails? We will be taking extra time off work and driving to Utah. So what if the Dork Lord gets a little antsy in the car after four hours, never mind twenty four. It’ll be a test of our deep and abiding love.  Ahem.

As for that zipper story: Biscuit, my date and hotel-room-sharer (the Boy and I could not both afford to travel to Boston for the event), was in the shower when I threw my dress over my head, tied the halter and zip…

“Biscuit! Gah! I need you! Mydressohmygod it’s stuck!”

The zipper had stopped a few inches from the top and would neither go up nor down. Biscuit scrambled into some clothes and to my rescue but no amount of tugging (or less physical but ingenious solutions) had any effect. It was going nowhere. At first I hit dead panic. The contents of my suitcase covered events like sleeping, eating take-out on Eleanor’s couch and um, not much else. That dress was IT as far as wedding apparel and I was going to have to make do. And I did, while praying to as many deities as were on call that the zipper didn’t suddenly quit altogether and expose a church full of innocents to my left boob. In the end, my zipper fears were totally in vain, because at the close of the night, Stuart had to use brute force to break me out of the dress, while Krissa and I squeezed our eyes shut in anxiety. Clearly, Stuart knows his bodice ripping, because the only thing damaged in the process was the rogue zipper. The dress will happily live to see more cake. 

Tomorrow morning, I’m getting on a plane and heading off to Boston for a few days. The lovely woman who held my hair while I gagged and heaved and wished for death in a Moroccan backpackers’ hostel, who zipped around the tip tops of the Costa Rican jungle with me, and who taught me the meaning of Stupid & Fancy is getting married. I cannot wait.

The expected high in Boston is a balmy 37 degrees. I love her just that much.

One of the beautiful things about this wedding is that Jen is a New York friend, getting hitched in her hometown of Boston – which, happily, is also one of my old hometowns. This visit will be like the winner-winner-chicken-dinner of visits, lacking only a handful of beloved friends and the family element to make it perfect.

The point is, I’m habitual. I fall into patterns – good and bad – with amazing ease and break out of them almost never. Because I find comfort in predictability. Every day, I park in the same spot – all the way on the very tip top level, even if the rest of the garage is empty – because it eliminates the need for the Parking Garage Confusion Dance. I follow the same make-up regimen every day because I can rely on the outcome.

I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that I apply the same cause-and-effect behavior to relationships. For years, I latched on to the same type of man, with the same type of personality flaws who would let me down in exactly the same way as his predecessor. Self loathers. Cheaters. Weaklings. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because it’s what I knew. I knew what it was like to feel the humiliation of public infidelity, of being undermined and undervalued. When I say I developed an addiction to disappointment, I mean I fed myself on the stress of living out dramatic, unhappy plot lines year after year. It gave me something to react to. It gave me an identity. I expected men to hurt and disappoint me and they, in turn, sure didn’t disappoint. And once again, I could blame someone else for my unhappiness.

And then I quit cold turkey. I don’t remember the catalyst. But in part, it was having watched both of my parents over the years, having grown up loving people whose unrealistic expectations and constant – and I do mean constant – discontent ate holes in the fabric of our family, that I decided I would not live that way.

Deciding and doing, though, are two very different things. When I met the Dork Lord two years later, I knew that was it. He was it. He knew it, too, and treated me the way you treat someone when you’ve decided you want them around for a long, long time. But I hadn’t exactly broken my attachment to old patterns. Rarely, but there was a time or two early on when he had the gall to be human and make a mistake and my first reaction, shamefully, was to lump him with the others. Asshole. I’d show him! Obviously that feeling didn’t last long (nor did I act on it), or we wouldn’t have lasted this long. But I did a lot of self talking at first. Old habits being the kind to die slowly and with agony, I hadn’t quite gotten rid of my instinct to get mad and get even.

This day has been such a long time in the making, I feel like there should be a parade or at least a commemorative plaque and an anthem, sang in rousing tribute to moderation! And to fiber! These jeans, they are nothing special, really, except I do appreciate them for maintaining their deep indigo color and that sweet little perma-crease over the years. But they do not, in any way, resemble mom jeans and they fit nicely for that, I could do back flips. You know, if I could summon the energy.

Also, my bum looks pretty great.

Aside from the sexy phlegm (which is mostly a waste since I don’t make a career on my voice), the flu has left me with this hacking cough that keeps me awake by night and annoys my poor coworkers by day. Like my friend said, coughing is some serious exercise and seeing as I cough myself dizzy at least three times an hour, I’m getting the workout of my life. And I’m totally exhausted. But I’m wearing jeans I don’t hate!

I’m not going to whine about how really awful the flu is because, duh. If you’ve had it, you know how bad it is. And if you haven’t had it, you know it’s bad enough you don’t want it. But let’s, just for a second, talk about the flu test. That thing really hurts. I don’t know if the doctor who saw me was under-practiced or just lacked finesse, but when she said she was going to swab my nostrils with that long cotton swab, I didn’t understand that her end goal was to grab a sample of my BRAIN. First I said the eff word and then I cried. I couldn’t not cry.

Coughing up fifty bucks for Tamiflu hurt less than the flu test – and you KNOW how I feel about unbudgeted spending.