Dear Cary,
I'm 26 years old and divorced. I'm engaged to be married to my best friend from college, the woman I should have been with since day one. There are no snags in our relationship with each other, but I am dreading the wedding because my family is bound to screw it up.
A couple of months before my divorce, my parents announced their separation. It was widely believed, and some claim confirmed, that my dad had an affair on my mother and left her. To be fair, my mother is not a nice woman, and my dad repeatedly talks about the 29 years in hell that was his marriage.
Since their divorce was final, my mother and I have also had a rocky relationship. She feels that she was abandoned by Dad and that her children will also abandon her since we've already met the other woman (whom she refers to as Dad's whore, slut, etc.).
My mother refuses counseling, which I, my brother and her entire family have begged her to seek. She thinks counseling is for the weak. She also maintains she never made a mistake in parenting us at all. At my brother's wedding, she flipped out -- chased me down the aisle, made a beeline for my dad to start something (intercepted by me), and got in an argument at the after-party with my brother. She has not guaranteed me that she won't be as nutty and disruptive at my wedding. When I asked my father to avoid her, his response was, "I'll make no moves to approach or contact her, but if she gets in my face, I'll knock her out." I wonder what the "perfect parent" guidebook would say about that.
I'm not asking for life advice. That would take you too many articles and would be fodder for the message board for ages, but how do I handle the wedding? Whom do I invite? How do I set ground rules? I just don't want my churlish and self-centered parents to ruin my bride-to-be's special day.
My Parents Have Reverted to Teenagers
Dear Son of Teenagers,
Have you considered hiring security? That was my first thought. But what do I know about weddings and security? In my family, we just get drunk and fight. So I called a wedding planner to see what she would do.
"I would suggest that you hire security," says Joyce Scardina Becker, president of Events of Distinction in San Francisco.
"I would also," she said, "in a very diplomatic way, as a wedding planner, have a personal conversation with each of the parties individually. The stress here really is on the couple, and it doesn't sound like the parents are acting as parents. I would tell the parent that you are going to hire security. Have a conversation with the parent, and if the parent still threatened prior to the actual wedding itself, then I would say, You know, if you really are going to hold this threat over my head, I think it's best that you do not attend my wedding."
As to the mechanics of hiring security for a wedding, I talked to Monica Hinojos, a training consultant at Black Bear Security. She said that not only do many wedding facilities and banquet halls require the presence of security as part of their contract with insurers, but that such requests from families, in her experience, have grown more frequent since 9/11. "He should have security there," she said. "The physical presence of a guard -- an effective guard, not one that's sleeping or slouching -- is that they deter incidents from happening. Just their presence alone. It's called 'officer presence,' and it's a deterrent." You should also, as Scardina Becker suggested, brief security on the background of your parents, and give them photos so they can pick them out and keep an eye on them.
I would definitely take this problem seriously, particularly your mother's refusal to promise not to act up, and your father's vow to "knock her out" if she approaches him. "You'd be surprised how many family members are killed at Thanksgiving and things like that. Especially if there's alcohol involved," Hinojos said. "They'd be smart maybe not to have alcohol served," she said, but that's up to you.
If alcohol is going to be served, I'd suggest you not make it an open bar, and identify your mother and father to the bartender so he can go easy on their libations. (Maybe he could even water their drinks!)
This is all assuming that, after your frank talk with both of them, they promise to try and behave. If they don't, as Scardina Becker suggested, you ought to tell them, difficult as it may be, that you would prefer they not attend.
And as to the long and complicated tale of your unhappy family and how it got that way -- the full telling of which you have mercifully postponed for another, longer day -- you know as well as I do that what Tolstoy said is so often quoted only because it's so often true: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
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