Kyle Hepp

October 13, 2007

Alright, so yesterday we left off a few days before my wedding…NADA was ready!

We desperately needed to find someone to officiate the ceremony (and someplace to hold the ceremony). We had called the Registro Civil, which is the equivalent of going to the courthouse to get married in the U.S., but here they will send somebody to your house to do the civil ceremony. All dates were booked, and we had known this from way back in December when we called but we tried again just to double check. They didn’t. So we thought we’d try to find some kind someone non-denominational to preside over the ceremony. Impossible to find in Chile. Or at least they are hard enough to find, that if you only have a few days to look, you’re out of luck. It was like trying to find a non-denominational needle in a Catholic haystack.

Ok, so we’re go with the flow people, we decided we’d be good with a Catholic priest. But, WAIT! Catholicism is not a go with the flow religion. No church we could find was down with presiding over our heathen ceremony…S. refused to take his first communion when he was younger at his Catholic school. He was a rebel from a young age. And I was never anything. I may or may not have been baptized when I was a baby. I think we have pictures of me wearing a white curtain and I assume that was for some form of religious ceremony, but really I have no idea. Mom, I know you’re out there lurking…care to weigh on this?

Another problem was that we didn’t want a full Catholic ceremony. We really just needed someone to stand up there and guide us to say our own written vows and yell, “You may kiss the bride!” when all was said and done.

S. had a genius idea, though, that we were sure would be our saving grace. He had a favorite teacher/priest from his Catholic high school who he knew was a bit of religious liberal and probably thought well enough of S. that he would be happy to marry us even though we’re not Catholic. But, just trying to get a hold of the guy was a total nightmare. The high school (for obvious reasons) doesn’t just give out the monastery phone number to anybody who calls and ask for it. S. had to actually go to the high school and show his old ID card and explain why he was looking for the priest. So they gave him the general phone number for where all the priests from that high school live…we thought we were in! Our hopes were quickly smashed when S. called and found out that nobody knew where his specific priest had went for the summer. He wasn’t staying at the monastery, that was all anybody could say. They gave us his cell phone number and S. finally got through. Our only hope for a nice ceremony was living in Punta Arenas for the next three months. That’s like calling up somebody you thought was living in Maine, only to find out they’re residing in (a really remote) California.

Dang it, this wedding was turning into more of a headache every single day. I was definitely wishing we had decided to elope. We had no more time to look for a priest. I asked my uncle who was coming down if he would do the ceremony, but he didn’t think God would approve. So our last resort was to send our best man out knocking on random church doors. He finally found somebody willing and S. had to go meet with him. All was good, the priest was available and willing to do a ring blessing ceremony like we wanted instead of a full Catholic service. Only catch, S. had to conveniently omit the fact that neither of us are Catholic, and also may have sort of led the priest to believe we were going to be doing the full ceremony later on in life in the U.S. Yes, we began our marriage with a blatant lie in the eyes of God and I am not ashamed

So that was one dilemma solved. Time frame is now Thursday, wedding being on a Saturday. My dress hung on me like a garbage bag (I bought it a size 10 and had to get it taken in to about a size 6). I called our amazing wedding planner (seriously, if you need someone in Chile to do an event for you she’s the best, www.anaya.cl), she had solved so many other problems , I figured she might know somebody reliable who could take in the dress. She did. So I went to the opposite end of town (think more than an hour from where I live) to get fitted and make sure she was legit. She was rich enough to be able to buy herself a bazillion dollar wedding dress if she wanted to, so I figured she wouldn’t steal mine. I was happy about that, and also about the fact that she had a lot of nice dresses hanging in her living room waiting to be sewn so she must’ve been good to be so in demand. What I was not thrilled about were the three ginormous canines that had free range in the house. I could just imagine one of them taking a shit on my train or chewing off the straps and buttons. That would be the last thing I needed. Oh well, trust blindly, had come to be my motto for this wedding since I didn’t have any other options. Anyways, the best part of all, she was bumping me to the top of the list she was good friends with our wedding planner and she would have the dress ready by the next day.

Oh yeah, and could she do S’s suit in a day too? She could, thank God. He had just went to a department store that day to outfit himself with something snazzy for the festivities but all the suits were like two feet too long in the arms and legs. He’s 5’6″ which is the average height for a man in Chile. So why all the suits at every major department store seemed made for men at least 7 feet tall was beyond me.

Things were finally falling into place and I was starting to relax a bit. The wedding planner also found me a good hair dresser and the appointment was made. He was actually going to do my mom and Sarah of Honor’s hair. We didn’t technically have a best man and maid of honor because I think those kind of things are silly, and to me all my friends that came to the wedding were equally loved. But, my best friend from high school was going to stand up and do the translating for the ceremony since she had previously studied abroad in Chile and speaks great Spanish. Her name is Sarah. She quickly became known as the Sarah of Honor. And she didn’t want to walk down the aisle alone so S’s best friend Lucho, became the Best Lucho.

As for a place to have the actually ceremony…we found one! After our wedding planner scoured all of Santiago she just started going to random bars near where we were going to have the reception and she found one that conveniently had a huge, beautiful backyard. I loved it!

My wedding was going to be a success. I could breathe again. I wasn’t worried about myself or S. I think both of us had very few expectations. We’re low key people that would’ve been happy just saying I love you and handing the rings to each other all by ourselves, but we felt pressured because of the people that had come from so far just for us and our celebration. If you take a twelve hour plane ride for a wedding you’re probably expecting a damn good party!

And let’s not forget S’s family. His MIL had big expectations for what things were going to be like. I don’t think our relations with his family had ever been more stressed than during wedding planning time. There were a few reasons for this. One was that she didn’t like the style of wedding we were planning. Things were a bit too casual for her liking. So it got to the point where I really didn’t want to discuss details with her…which of course meant her being horribly offended that I wasn’t including her in the planning. I felt bad about that but the thing was that every time I said shishkabobs and empanadas, she would freak out and start telling me that shrimp cocktail was more appropriate. She didn’t want people to wear jeans, and we had already told people they could wear whatever the heck they wanted to. Basically everything I wanted, she contradicted. Of course, when we finally sat down to talk about everything because she was upset, she denied that she ever had a problem with anything we wanted. There was also the question of money. I hate that it was a problem, but my Dad was paying for half the wedding (not because I asked, I absolutely do not believe in the tradition that the bride’s family should shoulder all costs. My dad offered because he knew S. and I were really financially stressed trying to pay for everything ourselves and he was in a position to be able to help). Anyways, since the wedding was in Chile, everyone on my side also spent thousands of dollars in plane tickets and travel costs. I knew S’s family wasn’t rolling in money and if we were to have had the wedding we probably would’ve ended up having to pay for their plane tickets. So I wasn’t expecting them to pay the other half of the wedding or anything of the sort…but I was expecting some sort of acknowledgement. In the end they did make a contribution, which was greatly appreciated but there was a time when I couldn’t help but feeling a little angry that they expected me and mine to carry most of the financial burden. I know now that they don’t think this way, but during the time when everything was going unsaid, it was always in the back of mind, “Do even they think that my family has money just because we’re from the U.S.?” That really bothered me for a while.

And the biggest conflict was who to invite. S.’s mom explained to us, that here in Chile a wedding is a social networking opportunity and you should invite everyone you know because you never know when they could help you out in the future. We had something much more intimate in mind. Aside from the fact that we couldn’t afford a big wedding, we simply did not want one. S. didn’t want to invite most of his dad’s side of the family. He told me that he had so little contact with them growing up that he actually felt closer to my aunts and uncles that he met while he was in the U.S. because they accepted him as one of the family right away. In comparison, when we made the announcement in Chile that we were engaged, he didn’t receive a single congratulatory email or phone call from any of his dad’s family. I thought that was really weird. Chileans are constantly bragging about how close families here are because it’s part of their culture. They love to criticize the U.S. and say that we aren’t as family oriented. I think they misunderstand parents encouraging independence in their children as parents loving their children less. I actually believe that gringo kids get along way better with their parents than Chilean kids with theirs because they aren’t so smothered. Anyways, that’s way off topic. To invite or not to invite S’s dad’s whole side of the family because another conflict in the whole scheme of things. S’s mom said it was a way of repaying them for things they had done for the family in the past. S said, “What have they ever done for me, I barely even know them! If they’ve done things for you in the past that’s not a debt for me to repay.” So then they were like, well can we invite our friends and family if we pay for them? And we were really not cool with that idea. Our wedding, our friends, our people. Are we both ridiculously stubborn? Yes. Was it a selfish decision? Yes. Do I regret it? Not a bit. The most amazing part of the wedding was that it was filled with people who truly loved us and wanted to celebrate our love with us…not people who were there because they are just a part of our extended social network. I feel like I have spent a lot of my life trying to please people. We still live next door to S’s family because I don’t want to hurt his mom’s feelings by moving out, for pete’s sake. S is constantly doing things for the family, for his mom’s sake. We both felt like our wedding had to be the one day that we put our collective foot down and said, “No, this day is about us and it’s going to be how we want it, with the people we want.”

So for months leading up to the wedding, even the week before, there was so much tension.

And this is getting long, so tomorrow will be the Just Married Chilean Style final and you’ll find out what happened on the big day, the best reward for all that stress