I hate weddings. I avoid them at all cost. I hate the whole industry. I never watch any of the stupid shows dedicated to the subject. Even driving by wedding shops makes me queasy and irritable.

Okay, I hear you asking, “aren't you married? Didn't you have a wedding?” Yeah, sure did, and here's some of the history leading up to that event. I started to hate weddings when I was about five or six years old. Most of my friends had been flower girls at some point and I had never been asked. It seemed so unfair. By the time I was a teenager I'd decided that love pretty much sucked and that I was likely never to be getting married so I didn't worry too much about it. Because I was a musician, I often got asked to do music at weddings but never once was I asked to be a bridesmaid.

In case anyone reading this is interested, Pachelbel's Canon is neither original nor appropriate for your wedding. He wrote it to mourn his wife and only child who died from cholera. Death and grief...mmm, maybe it is appropriate. Don't even get me started on using crap like “My Heart Will Go On” for a wedding song.

I digress. I went to the University of Lethbridge for my undergrad. It's five years of my life I'll never get back and I regret every second I was there and every dollar I spent. There are a million reasons the place wasn't right for me and one of them was the far-right, bible-thumping students. A vast majority of the women I was going to school with were either planning their weddings or already married and pregnant (a music degree is a great thing to get when you'll be at home raising 23 Mormon babies, you can teach piano in between contractions). Even if they weren't Mormon, there were enough church-types around doing things like “not having sex before marriage.” I even performed at one wedding where the father of the bride basically found a way to work it into his speech that his daughter was most certainly a virgin (I wonder if they displayed the sheets the next morning). Given how I was spending my summers at the time, this was probably one of the bigger signs that I was in the wrong place.

As university progressed, I was steadily becoming more depressed. With depression came weight gain (in retrospect I would have preferred turning to drugs, alcohol and bulimia to deal with my chronic depression). As my self-worth plummeted, all that wedding crap began to seep into my sub-concious. I was surrounded by “happy” couples and felt miserable. The relationship I was in at the time was incredibly destructive and added to my lack of self-esteem.

When university was over, I fled to Calgary. The awful relationship was finally over and I was free. Six months later I met Evil Scientist. Six months after that, we were married. We had a small wedding that was enjoyed by everyone and didn't cost a mint.

With our 10 year anniversary creeping up on us and the pregnancy hormones making me nuts I can't stop thinking about what an ugly bride I was. I hate my wedding pictures. “Short, fat and wide” that was me to a tee. Add to that, I had this awful short-cropped hair. I wish that we would have waited to get married until I didn't look so awful.

Because I have been feeling so fat, I've been obsessed by wedding dresses of late. It's stupid, but that wedding dress image of beauty is so ingrained in our society. It's everywhere and every wedding commercial or movie that has a wedding in it makes me cringe. It's not that I don't realize that it's just an industry specifically designed to play on my insecurities, I just can't shake the feeling of inadequacy I've carried around for ten years.

It was my intent to have my wedding dress tailored to my new size this year so I could get photos done that I liked. That plan is momentarily on hold (of course). As it stands now, it won't just be photos in one dress. Did you know that eBay has millions of wedding dresses for dirt cheap? I know it's lame but I find myself wanting to play dress-up in bridal wear until I actually feel pretty.

Did I mention that the pregnancy hormones are making me crazy? I'm starting to think that the responsible thing to do once I give birth is to hand the baby over to Evil Scientist and then calmly walk over to the psych ward.

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