It was a hot sweltering summer day in August of 2010. It was our wedding day and we were getting married in the backyard of my now husband’s parent’s house in Michigan. I considered myself a pretty low maintenance girl and didn’t require the dream wedding that consisted of ten’s of thousands of dollars. Actually, I think our wedding cost about $5k and my wedding dress was a whooping $120 from David’s Bridal. All the flowers came from Sam’s club and food was cooked by none other than my lovely mother in law and my older sister. The alcohol was brewed by my brother, who had a brewery and champagne was purchased at Sam’s Club. Our Port-a -Potties were even brought in by a friend of the family and purchased at a discount. I mean, if you wanted to do a wedding that was cost effective, ours would’ve been on the front page. We had under 100 guests and most of them were from my side of the family. We danced all night and had a blast and I never once regretted anything. A wedding is one day and a marriage is forever, it didn’t make sense to spend all that money on something that was only one day.
I’m a procrastinator so naturally, I was late to my own wedding. We had gone to get ready at my sister in laws house, which was a few minutes away from my in law’s house. Thankfully, the show could not go on without me so they kindly waited. I remember walking down the isle with my dad. It was awkward because in our culture, this was not how our traditional weddings were. I still remember my dad had left his ringer on so in the middle of our ceremony, his ringer was going off but he didn’t know it was his so it kept ringing.
After we said our vows the minister says “And Zay, do you take this man…” which resulted in a few laughs from the crowd and from my husband. As we all realized she had pronounced my name incorrectly. But nevertheless, we both said “I do” and thus began our life together as husband and wife.
