Anniversary

Thank you so much for all the wonderful comments about my wedding pictures.

I have to admit, I have never looked fondly at my wedding pictures before. I only ever had one picture developed and that was the pinky promise photo. I still have it in an 5x7 frame on a table with a bunch of other pictures. I don't have a wedding album.

There was a lot of drama surrounding our wedding and still 7 years later when the subject of our wedding comes up, I get a knot in my stomach.

Adam's parents hated everything about our wedding. Their biggest complaint was that our ceremony was so small. We had it on a Friday night with less than 15 people there. That's how we wanted it. We were both in agreement. We are not the kind of people who would enjoy standing in front of 100 people and saying our vows into a microphone. Adam's parents kept saying it was weird and that nobody would want to come to our reception if they couldn't come to our ceremony.

They said many, many other negative things and there were ongoing fights leading up to the wedding and they did their best to have a bad time the whole weekend. You can read more about that, here.

As much as I disagree with everything they said and I am glad we did it the way we wanted, I always have a bad feeling when I think about our wedding. A feeling of shame or embarrassment. I was actually enjoying my wedding and having a good time and then found out they were actively doing things to try and ruin it. I was humiliated by that. The joke was on me. I was blindly having fun while people were mocking me. After our wedding, one person after another told me stories of things Adam's parents did. Rude and awful things. Things I didn't notice, but my guests did.

Then the next day after our wedding, they called and told us it was the worst wedding they have ever been to. Ouch. That is the kind of thing that sticks with you.

The other thing is that everytime I look at the pictures, I remember how sick I was then.

I had my first D&C surgery six months before our wedding. I needed to have polyps removed and they were getting me ready to start trying to conceive immediately after getting married. There were already clues that it was going to be complicated. I was on a lot of hormones between the surgery and the wedding. I was so sick. My Mom actually did almost all the wedding planning because I was so sick. I remember when we were supposed to be doing cake tasting, I couldn't even take a bite. I was so nauseous.

I was really pale at my wedding. I had been tanning leading up to it but still looked as white as a ghost. In fact, I looked so bad that at my sister's wedding everyone kept telling me how great I looked. That I had so much color in my face.

When it came time to choose photos to go into our adoption profile, even my Mom suggested less wedding pictures because I look sick in them. I cried my eyes out when she said that, but she was right. I look pale and puffy. Every little girl's dream, right?

So, yesterday it was nice to post wedding pictures and smile about them. Then to receive so many sweet comments was really amazing. I was actually able to look at them in a positive way.

Of course anyone who has been trying to conceive or waiting to adopt for a long time knows that holidays and anniversaries are hard. They serve as reminders of how long you have been waiting. My wedding anniversary is also my anniversary of trying to conceive.

Seven years of waiting to start our family.

But, I did okay with that this weekend. I thought about it a little, but overall it was a really great weekend. We had a lot of fun.

And since we got married Friday night and had our reception Saturday afternoon, we consider it still our anniversary so we are continuing to celebrate today. :)

Thanks again for all the love in blog comments and tweets yesterday!