Preparation is Key, But…

All the preparation in the world won’t matter if you can’t execute in the moment. I recently learned that lesson from both ends. In one case the execution went almost flawlessly, and in the other, well, let’s just say that “it is what it is” and I have to let it go.

The successful venture was my son’s wedding celebration. Woohoo!!! Clearly the most important of the two, and I’m still basking in the afterglow of that magical night. Having never hosted a wedding, I had no idea how to help the happy couple or even what needed to be done. When you don’t hire a wedding coordinator to handle all the details and tell you what you need to do, then you have to figure it all out as you go, and try to remember everything. That’s where the team of people around you make all the difference. It takes a small army of friends, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews and relatives to mobilize at the critical moments and assist the massive effort to make the event seamless and fun. Although logistics got pretty complicated at times, people did get where they needed to be (airports, hotels, dinners, wedding venue, etc), no luggage got lost, groomsmen did their duty to make sure the bride and her bridesmaids were well taken care of, and all the boxes full of decorations, programs and other display items, along with buckets of flowers, all found a place in the room that would create the magic surrounding the bride and groom.

Planning a full-blown wedding celebration is not for the faint of heart. I’m not sure Maria and Conrad realized what they were in for when they began the process in April. As the mother of the groom and the only parent in the country available to help, I wanted to assist but wasn’t sure what they might need me to do.

Weddings can also cost a small fortune even when you are doing everything you can to keep those costs manageable. Some things just aren’t negotiable when it comes to making sure this once-in-a-lifetime celebration meets the vision of the happy couple. My goal from the beginning was to make sure, to the best of my ability to be helpful, that this wedding was everything they wanted it to be and more.

Of course, none of this is news to those of you who have been through this, but for those of you who have not, I offer these reflections and memories from the perspective of the mother of the groom (I don’t pretend to speak on anyone else’s behalf) on the logistics and emotional complexities of this experience. Spoiler alert: all the stress and drama and fear and uncertainty and yes, even the financial cost, was all worth it.

Early Summer 2024

I stayed mostly in the background during this period as Maria and Conrad put everything in motion and started making plans. Conrad initially wanted a casual, fun, apple orchard experience on the first day of fall. Maria preferred a fancy, formal experience that was also fun. They agreed on the first day of fall, and opted for a semi-formal party at an apple orchard - dressy but with a fun vibe. The venue was an apple orchard and cider mill that had a great space and lots of experience hosting this type of party. Conrad and I checked out the venue while Maria was still in Peru, and they went ahead and booked it to lock in the date. Conrad went to Peru in mid-June to surprise Maria at her Peruvian wedding shower, and then they came back together and moved into their rental home just 20 minutes from my house (yay!).

Mid Summer 2024

I’m still in the background for most of the summer, available for consults or research or legwork. Conrad and Maria both work remote during the week, and Maria is in an online graduate program that required her attention and presence Saturdays and Sundays every other weekend. So they were working on all the planning and organizing during the in-between moments.

The venue was 90 minutes from where we live, so Conrad booked several Airbnb’s closer to the orchard to house the wedding party and their families during the wedding weekend. Maria went on The Knot website and used that to set up a site that would allow them to send online invitations and track the responses. The Knot recommends different vendors in your area that you can contact for services, and the orchard also had a list of potential vendors they had worked with in the past. Maria started making contacts. The two of them also met with the person who would be officiating the wedding (a personal and very dear friend of mine) and the band leader who would be performing the music. We started an excel spreadsheet of all the different questions and decisions that would need to be figured out about the ceremony itself and the different activities that would need to happen during the evening. I discovered that nothing happens organically. It all has to be plotted, planned, scheduled, and decided (not necessarily in that order).

During this period I knew there was a lot to do and think about, but I wanted to be careful in how I tried to be helpful. While I didn’t want Conrad and Maria to get totally overwhelmed by all the details, the last thing I wanted was to be cast as the interfering mother-in-law who kept poking her nose into everything. I wanted to respect their process even while I was growing uneasy with the amount of work I knew was going to be needed. I tried to offer thoughts and questions while not pushing in any certain direction. They can tell you whether I succeeded or not.

Late Summer 2024

Four weeks out

Lots of activity in mid summer had put things in motion, but not much was nailed down by this point. I was travelling and camping off and on for much of the summer, so staying in the background was easy. When I got back from all the traveling, however, I realized that I might need to play a more active role, and that time was getting short.

I decided to organize a bridal shower but had to move quickly. I got back from my Cape Cod camping adventure on a Sunday, and by Monday afternoon the next day had all the plans in place for an informal shower at my house 6 days later. A combination of relatively local friends and relatives made it memorable and fun, and we even had a game, which is a required element at any shower, right? Maria seemed happy that I wanted to give her a pre-wedding party and I’m really glad I did (thanks, Celeste for putting the idea in my head!). There was no one else here in Michigan who could have done it since all “her” people were down in Peru.

Three weeks out

Three weeks before the wedding, Maria was still shouldering the bulk of the planning and organizing details by herself and the stress was beginning to show. She needed her mama to help her through this phase, and although they talked multiple times a day, the reality was that here in the U.S. she was on her own and her mother down in Peru couldn’t really help her with all the endless tasks that had to be done. She and Conrad were discussing and making all their decisions together, but the myriad of details that followed every decision fell mostly to her.

When she told me that she had taken the month of September off work, and that her weekend classes had moved to every weekend instead of every other weekend, I decided maybe it was time to step into a more active role as surrogate and very temporary pseudo mother of the bride. I offered to begin meeting with her to organize and figure out all the tasks and details that desperately needed immediate attention. Maria is a supremely organized, detail-oriented, and capable person, but I knew from my own experience that it always helps to have someone to bounce things off of and assist with the execution of details and decisions. Due to his work responsibilities, Conrad was simply in no position to be able to do the necessary deep dives into all the nitty gritty, but that’s where I’ve lived for much of my life and career. I thought I might be able to help out a bit. Maria, bless her heart, jumped at my offer and came to my house the day after the shower to start sorting everything out. We set up a document listing all the topics and tasks so that we could track our progress and not forget anything (my career as a project manager and planner came in handy at this stage). Here’s what we accomplished with three weeks to go:

• Both florist and cake baker had been chosen but were not locked in yet. Nailing this down took several phone calls and and conversations to make the necessary decisions and get the contracts in place so that all would be delivered at the right place at the right time and in the right quantities on the designated day.

• Marriage license had not been obtained (the complexity here was that we didn’t know if there would be any difficulty due to Maria being here on a visitor visa - turned out there wasn’t, thankfully). Fortunately, both parties did not need to be present to get the license, so Maria gathered all the documents they would need and she and I went to the county office together.

• Conrad needed his suit tailored and his car cleaned out so that people could be ferried around without being surrounded by mountains of husky fur. I called around to find a tailor that could meet our timeline and a car detailer who might be able to help us out. I told Carl, the person who detailed the car for us, about the upcoming wedding and he took an entire day to do the most thorough job imaginable of getting every single speck of dirt and every strand of fur out - his fee for the job was well-earned and the car was spotless!

• Maria and I made a trip to Detroit to pick up samples of the cake flavors they were considering, which paid off because the wedding cake ended up having three different flavors and everyone raved about it - yay! We also took time to breathe a little and had lunch near Detroit’s famous Eastern Market at an iconic deli and drove through the Heidelberg Project art installation.

• While Maria was working on her end of things that week, I was busy counting heads for the rehearsal and setting up that luncheon. Lots of back and forth and angst until the hotel and room were selected, contract signed, menu selected and deposit paid.

Two weeks out

Maria and I didn’t have much time to pat ourselves on the back for jobs well done the previous week, because now there were only two weeks till the wedding and there was still so much to do! So we dove right in and began checking things off the list:

• Dogs had to go to the vet and get their annual shots so that would be able to enjoy the wedding weekend at the Lucky Puppy Doggy Day Care spa and never know what they were missing.

• Table decorations had to be figured out, along with all the other accoutrements we wanted to have at the wedding, such as:

  • welcome table with programs, place to put cards and gifts, and a posted seating chart

    • this required both thought and effort into the program (who was going to do this?) and the seating chart (what’s the status of the RSVPs?)

  • Memory table - this was something we had decided we wanted to have somewhere in the room - a place where we could be sure that Conrad’s dad would be with us while everything was going on. A candle, some pictures, a small vessel with ashes, Jay’s pith helmet - I took charge of this task.

  • Favors table - the apple orchard would be providing an assortment of their jams and jellies for guests, but they decided they also wanted something representative of Peru. Maria got her mother to find some easily transportable favors that she could take on the plane with her.

  • Big wooden frame with an assortment of childhood pictures of both Conrad and Maria attached.

  • Bingo game for guests to play in any of the down times while waiting for dinner or photos to be completed. This actually turned out to be a lot of fun for many of the guests, and encouraged people who didn’t know each other to get acquainted. Maria and Conrad and I had fun making up different categories to fill the boxes and then Maria translated it all into Spanish so everyone could play.

  • Maria spent the week making multiple trips to the local Salvation Army, which turned out to have a cornucopia of decorating supplies at very affordable cost. Vases for the tables, laces and ribbons, garlands and greenery, you name it they had it. Maria is quite the artsy craftsy DIY artisan, and gathered together all kinds of items that turned out to be useful to the decorating crew. She designed many of the decorations herself, putting lace on baskets and wicker boxes to make them festive, and had all kinds of ideas that the set-up team put into action on the big day.

One week out

At this point, the enormity and urgency of the tasks remaining threatened to do us in. Maria’s family had asked Conrad to fly to Peru a week before the wedding to accompany Maria’s mother Alicia to Michigan (this was her first time flying out of the country) and to take charge of, among other things, getting Maria’s wedding dress and the rings up here. He left Friday night and arrived back Tuesday with Alicia, the dress and the rings, and some other very important items for the wedding. Long, exhausting trip but this served as the true beginning of the final countdown to the BIG DAY. Other people began arriving throughout the week, and Maria’s and my checklist in these final days before the rehearsal included:

• Designing and printing all the programs - my prior use of Microsoft Publisher came in handy here. I also ended up printing the table assignment cards and various other items that were needed the day of, including the vows for both Maria and Conrad (so I got the sneak peek before anyone else!).

• Figuring out the final seating chart - this was important because Conrad and Maria did not want people to divide themselves only by language or family affiliation. There would be many people there who didn’t fall into easily recognized groups and who may or may not know many people in the room. We carefully assigned people to tables that we thought would be conducive to conversation. There were a handful of Spanish-only speakers, and many English-only speakers, and a sizeable mix of bilingual speakers. We tried really hard to make sure that people would be able to get acquainted with the other people at their table no matter what language they spoke. We made similar decisions based on the different relatives and friends that we knew would be there. People may not have been sitting with the people they initially preferred, but we felt really good about how we had matched up people at the different tables. I hope that the guests felt the same way. Some last minute shuffling did occur when a few people were not able to come, leaving empty seats, and one table didn’t have the number of seats we had expected.

• Taking the dogs to Lucky Puppy where they remained happy and blissfully unaware that anything chaotic was happening back at their homes.

• Finalizing the schedule for the service and the activities that came after (cake cutting, grand entrance, certain dances, speeches, family performance). This all had to be coordinated with the photographer and videographer, who would begin his work at the Airbnb where all the women were staying, and then follow them to the venue where they would spend the evening taking various posed and random shots and videos.

• Finalizing the plans for the music, which included figuring out where the dance floor and band would be located. This then required finalizing the floor plan for the event itself - where the tables were going to be, the buffet, cake, etc. Since everything was taking place in the same big room - procession, ceremony, dinner, music and party - we had to plan how it was all going to unfold.

• People began arriving on Tuesday and a steady stream of relatives and friends began pouring into the area, some staying with Conrad and Maria, some staying with me, and many staying either in Lansing (where my niece lives and was hosting some relatives) or near the venue where we had recommended several hotels for out of towners.

With the final rush to the finish line going full speed, two things happened that allowed us to take a step back and breathe for a minute. On Tuesday, after Conrad and Alicia got to Ann Arbor, they and Maria came over to my house for a light supper, and then we went out to eat another night as well. We shared pictures, talked about our families, remembered Jay. It was a special, intimate time spent with just the four of us.

The second thing was the next night, Wednesday, when Conrad and I took our last opportunity before the wedding to have some one on one time together. We went to dinner at a restaurant we both remembered Jay liked, and we spent the evening just enjoying each other’s company. I didn’t have any particular words of wisdom on the eve of this big moment in his life, but I did say what I wanted to say and gave him a few little treasures for him to take with him in remembrance of the love of his dad and the collective family love and support he will always have, unconditionally and no matter what.

Rehearsal Day

Getting close!!!

By this day I had made the trip to Conrad and Maria’s house with my van (having loaned my car to the groomsmen for the weekend) to pick up all of Maria’s various decorations, boxes, and other items that needed to go to the venue. Scissors, tape, glue gun, stapler, ribbons, lace, picture frames, signs, programs, photos, guestbook, baskets, boxes, items to go on the memory table, etc. etc. were all piled into the van.

The rehearsal itself proved its worth, and we got a lot figured out just by being in the venue, seeing the layout of the space, and practicing our procession. We left feeling pretty good about how it would go, and headed to the luncheon about 30 minutes away.

The luncheon was nice (if I do say so myself) and the food was tasty (so I was told; my nervous energy at this point had completely suppressed my appetite and I could hardly get anything down). It was casual, with about 30 people that included the wedding party and some of the decorations crew and some of the out-of-towners who had arrived. I had planned a short little program where I made some awards to some key people and tried to express the gratitude I felt for the people who were helping me ensure that this would be a memorable event for Conrad and Maria. People laughed at my jokes, so I deemed it a resounding success.

Wedding Day!!!

I really have no words at this point to adequately describe the depth of love that was in the room that night. Suffice it to say that various people, including (most importantly) Conrad and Maria, independently confirmed that all our hard work had paid off. Everyone who came was able to participate at whatever level they felt comfortable and everyone (from my admittedly limited vantage point) seemed to have a good time. Many of us danced the night away. Quite a few people played the bingo game. Several had a slice of each of the three flavors of cake (I mean, why not?). Some made new friends and rekindled old acquaintances. Some posed for silly pictures, and family groups who had been out of touch for years got together to document the reunion.

Cultures crossed but did not clash, and it was a beautiful thing. Maria’s family in Peru, including her father Julio, attended the entire event via Zoom, from a tablet attached to a rolling cart so that they could see it all first hand. Everything happened in two languages so that everyone could understand. (Thanks especially to Francie, Diana, and Rosie for stepping in to translate when needed!).

The love and emotion in the vows and speeches brought tears to our eyes.

It was perfect in every way. Except for one…

Perception vs. Reality

As I said in the opening paragraph, preparation isn’t always the only thing that matters. In the critical moment, things happen that you can’t necessarily control, and then you just have to try to keep up. Literally.

One highlight of the evening was when the Lebold Family and Friends Band played a song written especially for Conrad and Maria. The lyrics were written by my brother-in-law David, and the tune chosen was You Are My Sunshine. I had requested this tune in particular for two reasons: one, any song about sunshine would be appropriate to honor Conrad’s proposal during the total eclipse; and two, it was a relatively simple song with only 3 chord changes that I thought I might be able to manage on my banjo. I practiced that song and my little solo part every single day all summer long no matter where I was or what else I was doing, and by the time the wedding day rolled around I was feeling pretty good about my chances of being able to play it in front of a crowd of 90 people. Even the slight setback a week before the wedding when my banjo neck broke after falling off its stand didn’t deter me. I was able to get it repaired within a day and kept right on practicing.

When the moment came and the musicians were gathering, I introduced the performance, told a little story, and went to get the banjo. Horrors! I couldn’t find my fingerpicks! The rest of the band warmed up while I scurried around desperately searching for them (to anyone who’s wondering, there are two styles of banjo playing: clawhammer, which doesn’t use finger picks, and Scruggs or bluegrass style, which does. That was me and I couldn’t play without the picks.) I was already nervous and this didn’t help. The guests were patiently waiting while I rushed around like a madwoman.

Finally found the picks, sat down, and the band immediately launched right into the song. With no time to warm up, I tried in vain to keep up with the too-fast-for-me-tempo that had been set by the keyboardist who was at the opposite end from where I was (in fairness to Josh, the song was already at a glacially slow pace, but I didn’t have any ability to signal him that it was still too fast because he was too far away and I had to focus on my fingers). I still had not found my rhythm by the time my solo was supposed to start and, you guessed it, totally flubbed it. I’m sure the guests didn’t care one whit, and the rest of the song was fine because everyone else knew what they were doing, but I was left annoyed and frustrated with myself. Not enough to ruin the fantastic party, but enough that I continue to stew about it even now.

As I said in the first paragraph, “it is what it is” and I need to let it go. Everyone had fun throughout the entire enchanting evening and the song was a highlight even with its flawed banjo player.

So maybe there’s hope. I’ll keep plugging away on the instrument I love so much and who knows, maybe someday I’ll be ready to play in front of people again…

Next Steps

I’m heading out of the country for a couple of weeks, so I may chronicle those adventures when I get back. Super excited to be visiting a part of the world where I have never been.