<p>^^^ That’s terrible, momof3. You had every right to get the family photos that you wanted and it’s awful that they rushed you. </p>
<p>@Marian I think you hit the nail on the head. They had no experience with this and their way of handling it was to attempt to control every last detail. I have planned receptions like this for 150 people so I have a clue, but no one cared. I understood my place as the mother of the groom and that things are done quite differently on the opposite coasts. My kid is such a nice guy, and we know he was totally caught in the middle on this. He’s been to enough of these “events” where he’s gotten a feel for what he would have liked. But, as I said, they seem to be really happy and that’s the important thing. I still have two more sons who I hope will get married while I am still alive and maybe those weddings will be “smoother.” </p>
<p>Thanks for the details. I’ve been following your posts but, being from the NW, have sensed some east coast “west coasters are weird” bias. Now I see that this was pretty bizarre, even by Seattle’s more relaxed standards.</p>
<p>My parents and husband’s parents never saw each other after the wedding, and they only lived 200 miles apart. I doubt you’ll ever cross paths again.</p>
<p>What was their reason for the no touching while walking down the aisle rule? </p>
<p>@Bell1958 and others-My son is a very laid-back even keel kind of kid. He certainly doesn’t get that personality trait from me, LOL. His bride, he tells me, is a very stressed out kind of person all the time, so I guess they compliment each other perfectly! He just picked his battles although I can’t really tell you that he “won” any of them. ;)</p>
<p>@momof3sons Your story is a good reminder to me that if my daughter decides to marry her boyfriend, who comes from a large and very competent family, I should offer to pay for the wedding and beg them to make all the arrangements. And I should be grateful for the rest of my life if they agree.</p>
<p>@Indiana91 I don’t really think I had an anti-West Coast bias. As things developed within the past year, I just learned how differently things were handled. I do have friends/relatives from other areas of the West Coast and they were pretty surprised by how things developed here. Again, I think it was a matter of the bride’s family being really uncomfortable with the amount of people and dealing with our extended family. I do have some incredible, somewhat horrifying additional stories, but maybe I just need to send out a mass PM…:D</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of the groom walking down the aisle with his parents. Is this common? (I’m a future MOG.)</p>
<p>@Indiana91 This is the custom in Jewish weddings. Both parents walk the groom down the aisle. Both parents walk the bride down the aisle.</p>
<p>MO3–you are a saint–not letting you take the photos you wanted for grandma was just wrong! I’m pretty laid back but it is stressful to host a wedding–my D’s been married for 5 years now so I’ve forgotten–kinda like childbirth.</p>
<p>I read things like this, and I am glad my wife and I handled most of our wedding in terms of the planning and such. I think part of the problem with weddings these days is this incredible need for it to be ‘perfect’, or ‘blow people’s socks off’ or whatever, or fear that somehow something going wrong will ‘put a black mark’ on the relationship. We forget the wedding is about celebrating two people in love and it becomes war or something. Yeah, some people are anal retentive jerks who will remember every flaw, but who cares, they are jerks…funny part is my wife and I did ours kind of ad hoc, we didn’t have detailed plans, we didn’t have the rehearsal dinners and so forth (which was relatively easy, given our wedding was relatively small, my family is small, hers even smaller, some friends), put things together pretty quickly, and I still have people raving about it <em>lol</em>…I think we have to remember in the end, how well or badly the wedding comes off has little to do with how happy the marriage is…</p>
<p>Raising my hand for the mass PM!</p>
<p>Thanks – I like that custom! Hopefully one of my sons will marry a nice Jewish girl.</p>
<p>Put me in the mass PM!</p>
<p>Me, too!</p>
<p>Oh dear. Wouldn’t you hate to be the ones who can’t see the forest for the trees? You and DH are remarkable. I hope you schedule a chance for yourselves to re-group from this experience. I’d say unbelievable, but I am too old for that.</p>
<p>I’ll be mother of the bride (I hope!) at some point, and I can honestly say that I’d knock my daughter into next year if she ever treated anyone like that!</p>
<p>And I don’t think it’s necessarily an East Coast/West Coast thing. We just attended a lovely East Coast groom/West Coast bride, and the West Coast family could not have been nicer to us (family of the groom) or to the groom’s parents. Of course, I don’t know the details of the planning, but I’ve been told that the bride & groom did most of it.</p>
<p>I guess the bride and her family forgot one of the most important traditions in a Jewish wedding: that the parents on both sides stand under the chuppah to join not just a bridal couple but two families together. Oh, and of course there’s that other Jewish tradition: “Honor thy father and thy mother” which goes for grooms as well as brides.</p>
<p>It is the bride and groom’s wedding. </p>
<p>If the bride wants me to hop down the aisle, I will. I can hug my daughter another time.</p>
<p>Momof3sons, congrats on your son’s marriage. Glad to read that the couple like each other.</p>
<p>I am glad the couple was happy and am also grateful that I am unaware if people were unhappy about our wedding and how we arranged it. To the best of our knowledge, everyone was happy and satisfied. I hope it will be the same when our kids marry.</p>
<p>
And what wabout what the groom wants? Also, weddings are about families, too, and no member of the immediate family should be treated with disrespect.</p>