okay. this is stressful.

I admit, I talked a bighuge, full-of-myself game in my early posts on wedding planning and I as soul mates. I was having a blast picking my game-day team who would help bring my vision to life. Bringing two families together was easy as pie. DIY nonsense projects to make the day homespun and girly? Sure that was a daunting list, but I look forward to working on every little labor of love.

Indecision (aka Crazybride) is not the source of my stress either, but rather the result of handling my stress in inappropriate ways. It's just the part of me that makes me hesitate when someone asks me how wedding plans are coming along because I'm not sure they really want to get into the benefits of letterpressed invitations or cardigans over shawls- but that's where my mind is.

I am stressed because I'm a guilt-ridden people-pleaser. And I'm planning an interfaith ceremony.

We have done a disproportionately greater amount of work to prepare for the Catholic side of things, but it is going to be a disproportionately more Jewish ceremony. I don't have a problem with this, but my mother does. The problem is, the priest our parish secretary sent my inquiry email to isn't exactly a hand-holding teachable moment kind of preacher. Meanwhile, I am wide-eyed and needy when it comes to anything religious. I need HELP and I'm oversensitive. I love the culture of my religion- I sometimes even believe in it, but CCD that ended in 5th grade where we read passages out of a Precious Moments Bible did NOT prepare me for representing the entire Catholic faith equally against the beautiful symbolic socially relevant wedding ceremony of the Jewish people.

I also confessed to phone-a-phopia in my early big-talkin Lil' Miss Planner post. It's back, full throttle, and I can't kick it. You hand me a phone and ask me to call a Catholic priest and your going to watch a confident 26 year-old woman crumble into a hyper-venhilating cold-sweating cotton-mouthed kindergartner who will kick and scream and negotiate until you'll make the call for her. Except I don't have a choice. What am I going to do make Marc do it? Then I'll NEVER know whether the priest can bless the rings and read the Nuptial Blessing and what's a reasonably inoffensive New Testament reading? Which I still don't. Because this particular priest isn't much of a talker.

But finally, I am stressed because I'm throwing myself into wedding planning to avoid a number of bigger life issues at hand: I'm quitting acting (as a dream career), Marc quit his lawyer job, we're moving out of New York and back to PA, Marc's mom started chemo last week (her outlook is 100% positive, no worries, all. It's just a really sucky treatment), I want to start school in January, we don't know where we'll be living or what we'll be doing 2 months from now, my sister has never worn a dress and we went shopping yesterday to turn her into a bridesmaid. I'm possibly the most uncertain and confused I've ever been in my life, and this ceremony planning stuff is hitting me where it hurts. Making me evaluate who I am and who we are as a couple. Not just what color linens do I prefer. And I feel like I'm in it alone because Marc is Atheist/Agnostic/Secular Humanist/no-label-guy who lives in the present. He'll talk me down from a manicly stressed out place, but he can't commiserate.

What part of wedding planning was capable of pushing you over the edge? And was anyone else making some major life changes months from the big day? Any survivors have advice on stress management?