The Picture in My Bedroom

 

My Wedding: The Beautiful Disaster

(a memoir shard)

The picture on my bedroom wall is probably my favourite photograph from my wedding — but I couldn’t put it in a frame for ten years. I was too devastated by everything that went wrong. Only now do I understand it was rejection sensitivity, grief, and the heartbreak of trying so hard while everything kept collapsing around me.

We were young. We thought a wedding was just a big party and everyone would want to celebrate with us. We didn’t think about RSVPs or numbers or budgets. We invited everyone. And everyone came.

The Morning Chaos

To save money, we decided on a buffet — which meant a Costco‑style food haul and my parents and me in the kitchen on the morning of my own wedding, making egg sandwiches and chopping things. I was wearing a tie‑dye outfit while the hairdresser tried to do my hair. I’d made everything myself: the floral hairpiece, the veil, the decorations. I’d cut a picture out of a magazine at the library and tried to recreate the entire look from scratch. Practicality never crossed my mind — my brain excels in chaos, never in calm.

My dress pattern came from a hardware store when I was fourteen (Maxwells, Woodley) — a kind of Victorian wench style, corseted at the front, purple panels with cream satin. The fabric cost £100 — real satin, gorgeous to touch — and the dressmaker cost another £100. I never even tried on a “real” wedding dress. There was no budget for that.

The suits were the expensive part — about £500 for my three brothers: Rich, Phil, and Paul (my would‑be dad). That swallowed the rest of the money. The choir cost £80 in pound coins. I can’t remember the church fee. My only real splurge was a pair of cream Doc Martens — about £40 in 1995 — and the fake pearl drop earrings and choker I’d hunted for endlessly. No real pearls in my family line.

All the men looked like they’d walked out of Pride and Prejudice — gloves, hats, big boots. My dress was heavy satin, slightly too big because I’d lost weight, but still beautiful. I’d used curtain edging as trim and attached tiny roses down the front. It was my dream dress — or rather, the only dream my ND brain allowed me to have. I never put myself first. I just wanted it done.

My hair was pulled through a wicker floral display piece — I hadn’t thought about how rigid it would be — and my curls fell in big ringlets. I couldn’t move my head. The veil comb was attached at the back because I didn’t want it over my face, but I still wanted something traditional.

The Picture

We couldn’t afford a photographer, but one of the witnesses — I’m 90% sure it was Kelly, beautiful Kelly (another shard for another day) — captured a picture of Rich and me. We look so young, so innocent. He was the thing I loved most in the world. He looked beautiful. And now, looking back, so did I.

But that picture stayed hidden for ten years because of everything that followed.

Tesco photo printing ruined half the negatives — they were meant to be black‑and‑white and colour, but the processing went wrong. In hindsight, I probably ticked the wrong boxes or misread the words. I probably chose the cheaper option. Magical thinking — always assuming it would turn out fine.

The First Collapse

Rich and his groomsmen — his band, Scarbabeaus — were supposed to photocopy and assemble the order of service at work. They did it so haphazardly that the pages were stuck together and crooked. A joke, really.

Then we realised how many people had turned up.

I walked into the church and completely fell apart. I was overwhelmed before the ceremony even began. I saw Rich, and I couldn’t stop crying. Neither could he. We had to pause the ceremony for five minutes just to stop sobbing. My legs shook walking up the aisle. I was overstimulated, on show, and silently head‑counting — terrified we didn’t have enough food or chairs or space.

Rich, meanwhile, was simply handsome and in love with me — no thoughts, no logistics, no panic. He just had to arrive.

The Reception Typhoon

We’d hired the Emmanuel Church Centre — a square, community‑hall‑type building. There weren’t enough tables. Not enough chairs. Not enough food. People kept arriving. It felt like a typhoon picking me up and dropping me down.

Everything was homemade — the buttonholes, the flowers, the table decorations. Someone put balloons up. The cake was one of the biggest expenses, and we had to hire a swan‑shaped stand for it. The hall was covered in church banners. It looked like a patchwork of borrowed bits.

And then Rich started vomiting. Food poisoning. He’d eaten from a van the night before, even though I’d begged him not to.

Courtney — age five, in his tiny Moon and Stars Doc Martens — stepped on my dress and left two big footprints on the front. He spilled prawn sauce down it. Rich kept being sick. I had to take over everything: hosting, apologising, spinning plates, trying to keep the whole thing from collapsing.

Rich’s sister was supposed to get everyone to sign the guest book. She forgot. We have no idea how many people came.

The Breaking Point

By the time David — Rich’s dad — said it was time to take us to the hotel, I was relieved beyond words. Before we left, one of my brothers offered me weed to calm me down. I can’t smoke — I inhaled once, choked, spluttered — but it was enough to make me woozy and soften the edges of my anger and heartbreak.

All I had done at my own wedding was work. Work for everyone. Work to hold everything together. Work while Rich was sick and everything fell apart.

The Hotel

We stayed at a posh hotel in Caversham — my first proper hotel room — but we didn’t even get a river view. Rich vomited the entire night. I got into the bath, fell asleep, and woke up in cold water. In the morning, we were collected and taken home. Rich continued vomiting for three or four days of our supposed honeymoon.

I got my first ever room‑service breakfast — not by choice, but because sitting alone in a breakfast room would have felt too big, too exposing, too much. So I tried to make it an “experience” in the middle of the carnage of vomit, pretending for a moment that this was what a honeymoon was meant to feel like.

Courtney was at a caravan with my mum. Eventually I went to get him because we managed one trip to Alton Towers — or possibly I imagined it, planned it, and we never actually went; more likely that — and one trip to London. We were metal‑heads then, Rich by religion, me never by fashion choice, but we got matching boots, Tank Girl style. My favorite boots ever.

We got tattoos: mine said “Rich Always and Forever” in Arabic — trusting that his work colleague had tidy handwriting and good spelling, even though Rich joked she was the untidiest person alive. I got mine on my ankle. He got a War hammer Ork on his arm. Twenty‑one — apparently your brain isn’t making adult decisions until twenty‑five. I’d already made many.

Eventually he needed medication to stop the vomiting.

The Aftermath

That’s why the wedding picture stayed hidden for ten years. I was stung. Heartbroken. Overwhelmed by everything that went wrong when I had tried so hard to make everything go right.

Now I can see it clearly: it wasn’t the wedding that broke me. It was the rejection sensitivity, the over stimulation, the crushing weight of responsibility, and the grief of watching every plate I spun fall to the floor — only to be so blinded by what I thought was irrevocable all consuming ND love.

But the picture — the one on my bedroom wall — is still beautiful. Because in that moment, before the chaos, we were just two young people who loved each other.

And that part was the real about the day.

My fairy tale was spun from imagination, creativity, and ever‑fixing — I could easily have been the set director, cast, and crew. But in the end, the glue didn’t hold for one.

You need a creative team… because the marble bounced across the wooden floor, scattering everywhere, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get them back in the bag. That was the truth of it — I was one person trying to do the work of ten.