What was less fine was the way my bridesmaid status evolved over the months, or rather the way it seemed to quietly downgrade without anyone announcing the change. I went from being invited to the initial venue walkthrough to not being included in the florist consultation, the caterer tasting, or the cake tasting. I was not part of the bridesmaid dress selection process, which I learned had happened on a Saturday in October when Claire texted me a photo of a dress in sage green and said “this is what we’re wearing.” Not a question. A fait accompli.
The sage green dress was fine. My exclusion from the selection of it was a small thing, the kind of small thing that accumulates into something larger over time but that you cannot reasonably raise as a grievance in isolation without sounding like you’re making a problem out of nothing.
The second thing was our mother.
Diane Bennett is sixty-two years old and has been, since my father died, the organizing force of our family’s emotional life. This is not a complaint; she needed to be that force after what happened, and she became it, and it has largely served us well. She is also, in her loving and fundamentally well-meaning way, a person who manages her anxieties by managing the people around her, and she had a strong preference for everyone behaving in ways that kept the peace.
Throughout the wedding planning process, my mother communicated to me, in various subtle and not-subtle ways, that my role was to support Claire’s vision, to smooth over any friction, and to be easy. She said this without any awareness that she was also communicating that my needs and feelings in the situation were secondary to Claire’s comfort. She would call me to debrief after conversations with Claire, and the debriefs had a consistent underlying message: Claire is under stress, the wedding is a big deal to her, we need to be supportive.