You are currently browsing the deep wedding thoughts category.
At a bachelorette party last weekend, the bride-to-be proclaimed, “I already feel married.” To that, I had only one question, “what does it feel like?” She looked at me like I was nuts, but hey… it’s not the first time.
Yep… one month in and I have yet to feel married. People keep referencing my “husband,” which always leaves me scratching my head and wondering who in the hell they are talking about.
The question remains… when will it feel like marriage? While fighting about money? Deciding to have children? Buying a house? Filling out beneficiary forms?
For Chris, the answer came last night. I had been feeling especially domestic, so I cleaned the house, popped dinner in the oven, and chilled some champagne. As he sat on the couch and admired my handiwork, he commented happily, “my wife.” While I appreciate his admiration, I have to wonder, would he have felt married if I had been sitting on the couch swigging a beer instead of dusting the windowsill? And in return, does he need to live up to husband stereotypes in order for me to feel like we’re hitched? Will I finally feel bethrothed when he shows up at home with his Christmas bonus, eager to put a down payment on the family pool?
For five years, I made a living writing celebrity gossip and pop culture content. I earned a decent wage trashing the Britneys and the Mileys of the world without stopping to think about whether what I was writing was actually true.
And now… payback is a (fill in the blank).
Last week, an acquaintance on Facebook emailed me to saying he knew a writer who wrote a blog about our name change. The acquaintance went on to joke that maybe he’d considered taking the last name “Tesla.” It was a rude awakening to the sad fact that people who don’t know us well are going to make assumptions about our motivations for choosing the name Ford.
As a response, I’ve created an FAQ to answer some of the questions that have been circulating.
Q: Ford donated a car to your Wedding Road Trip. Did they bribe you to change your name?
A: Yes, Ford loaned us a car for our Wedding Road Trip. That being said, the name change was as much of a surprise to Ford as it was to our parents and friends. We haven’t discussed it extensively with anyone at Ford.
Q: But you get a free car, right?
A: Um, no. Roxy is being returned to the media fleet as promised. We might be able to purchase her at dealer auction in a few months- for those of you who are slow… purchase means that we’re going to buy Roxy.
Q: Oh come on. You totally changed your name to get a free car.
A: Pre-Roxy, both Chris and I went without cars for three years. Given the awesome public transportation system here in SF, we’ve never needed to own a car. By the way, if we wanted to capitalize on changing our name, we would have gone all out and taken Gates, Getty, Cyrus or Spears.
Q: Whatever. If you had driven a Hyundai on your Wedding Road Trip, you would have changed your name to that instead of Ford.
A: By your logic, it’s a good thing we weren’t given a SmartCar.
Q: It’s totally lame to name yourself after a product. I’m surprised you didn’t name yourself after Best Buy or Google, you’re that lame.
A: Ya, it was a real toss up between Ford and two other products we use quite often, Tampax and Trojan.
Q: I can’t believe Chris changed his name. If he were my brother, I would disown him.
A: He’d probably disown you too for being such a tool.
Q: What if you get divorced? Will you go back to your “normal” name?
A: We’ve been married all of two weeks and don’t plan on considering a divorce in the near or distant future. If we ever do, we’ll handle it in the same way that women have handled it for the last hundred years.
If you want to know why we really chose the name, you can always read about it here.
Friends have told me that we’ll be looking back on the wedding experience for several weeks to come. While I already feel like everything happened approximately one hundred years ago, I have to agree that certain moments keep cycling through my mind, one of which was the Parent Dinner last Wednesday night.
No matter what the movie, whether it be Monster in Law or Rachel Getting Married, parents are painted as the biggest cause of pre-wedding angst for cinematic brides and grooms. Chris and I, ever the gullible, expected that to be the case in real life. We tried to avoid the awkward parent meet up by combining it with our rehearsal dinner and were shut down by six angry parents who most definitely wanted to meet prior to any group activities.
Yep, you read that right: six parents. Chris only comes with two, while I have four on my side, three of which have been with me basically all of my life. Before you start thinking my dad’s a candidate for the next season of Big Love, let me clarify. My mom and dad split up when I was a wee little girl. A year or so later, my mom met and married my stepdad John. Given that he was around for all of my pre-teen and adolescent angst, he has pretty strong credentials as one of my parents. My dad’s current wife came much later in the game (last year), but is probably the feistiest of the bunch. Imagining these four teamed up with Chris’s nice, pleasant, mid-western parents was enough to make me consider smoking the grass, if you know what I mean.
Turns out that compatibility was not the issue I should have been worried about. The six of them got along like sorority girls at a trunk sale while Chris and I sat on the sidelines like last year’s fashion. I think we probably spoke a combined five sentences the entire night. It went something like this:
Jaime: So on Saturday, we’ll-
Mom #1: So Kathy, where did you get that sweater? It’s positively divine.
Chris: Well, that sweater actually reminds me that it might be chilly at Saturday’s ceremony and-
Dad #1: We should probably talk about Saturday’s ceremony. Dad #2, what do you think?
Dad #2: Well, maybe we should ask the kids when they’re around.
Chris and Jaime: We’re right here!!
During dessert, we finally got our moment in the sun when we announced our name choice. We figured, hell, they gave birth to us and stuff, which probably gives them some special privileges over the rest of Saturday’s guests. I must say, I was quite relieved when Chris’s mom positively beamed at our selection, given that she shares quite a history with the name.
Special Note: I think our parents would have caroused late into the night if I hadn’t put the kibosh on the evening around ten thirty to get my beauty sleep. This just proves two things. 1) I need a lot of rest and 2) I am officially older than my parents.
Both thoughts=disturbing.
Brides and grooms, I offer you one piece of advice: learn how to dance. Don’t wing it. While this picture might make it *look* like we can dance, it is, in fact, an optical illusion.
Thankfully, our friends and family were rather gracious, so no one made too much fun of us. That being said, the smirks on peoples’ faces in most of the pictures tell the real story.
Incidentally, we only had two slow songs at our post-ceremony party. The first was “My Mona Lisa (The One)” by Billy Schafer, a friend of ours. The second was “Oh” by Dave Matthews, not a friend of ours. Both songs are available on iTunes.
Yes, we’ve chosen a name- it’s Ford. Scott and Janet… you called this one weeks ago, but we didn’t want to share the name until we had completely decided and were ready to commit.
You’re probably wondering why, especially if you weren’t around this past weekend to see us get married. While I’d rather be writing about our amazing weekend right now, this decision seems to require some explanation for people, so here we go.
Let’s recap how Chris and I went about deciding to choose our own last name:
1) I didn’t want to take Chris’s name and he wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of there being two Mrs. Hodges (the first being his mother).
2) Chris didn’t want to take my name, which is fine, because Mr. Case is in fact, my father.
3) We didn’t want to hyphenate our names, thus creating a new disease, the Case (of the) Hodges.
4) We wanted to choose a name that would work for the whole family, which may or may not someday include children, dogs, and random goldfish.
When we first started talking about the idea of coming up with our own new name, we were sitting at a breakfast table in Charleston, South Carolina. The name “Ford” came up immediately, given that we were having such an amazing journey and we felt like the name encompassed our common experience. We quickly tossed the name aside as pandering and considered everything from Solstice to Equinox, Katmar (our moms’ first names combined) to Dwyer (Chris’s grandmother’s maiden name). We even established a few rules:
1) The name had to be American, because neither of us thought it was appropriate to take on an ethnic last name just because it “sounded cool.”
2) It couldn’t be the maiden name stolen from a good friend.
3) It couldn’t be a first name, last name. (ie: Chris Ryan, Jaime Bruce)
4) It couldn’t hurt anyone (ie: taking my stepdad’s last name would hurt my father)
5) It had to be easy to say and spell so that we don’t torture our future kids.
After two months of long conversations, intense fights, and hours of thinking, we both realized that the first name we came up with, Ford, was exactly the right choice. Here’s why:
1) The word “Ford”, as defined by dictionary.com, means “to cross a river.” It implies strength and determination, two qualities Chris and I hope to embody in our marriage.
2) President Gerald Ford, an adopted member of the Ford family, was from Grand Rapids, Chris’s hometown. Chris holds Gerald Ford in high regard, as does the rest of his family.
3) Betty Ford helped raise awareness for breast cancer and was considered a leader in the Women’s Movement. She is also the founder of the world-famous Betty Ford Clinic, which helps treat substance abuse and addiction.
4) Ford is the only American car company that didn’t take bailout money.
5) Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company with the idea that the common man should and would be able to afford his own car. The Ford Motor Company still works to achieve this goal today.
6) Roxy has been like a family member to us, and since her last name is Ford, we’re happy to share it with her. Even though we’re going to have to say goodbye to her this week, she’ll always live very large in our memories.
7) Driving around the country seeing the Ford sign everywhere made Chris and I feel like a part of a larger family- we loved that.
8 ) Chris’s mother has an extensive history with Ford.
9) My father, who was the student body president of Fresno State, was given a Mustang fastback during his presidency.
10) My first truck was a Ford Ranger- a vehicle that is infamous to anyone who ever drove with me in high school. My brother, who was one of my best friends growing up, always had Mustangs.
11) My grandfather Bud loves driving around the entire country in his Ford Ranger.
It goes on and on. No matter what other names we came up with, Ford kept coming back.
Now that we’re married, we’ll begin the process of changing our name legally. We plan on keeping our maiden and bachelor names as our middle names, so that people will always know where we’ve come from.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
