Hello Hitchers.
This is my first post so please go easy on me but I could really do with some advice/encouragement/telling-off-for-being-a-bad-person(delete as appropriate). I'll apologise in advance if this turns into an incoherent rant since it's past my bed time and I've had a beer.
Just a little background info. My wedding is on the 14th Jan 2012. It's in the East Midlands where most of my friends and OH's family live and my family are about 150 miles away in Lancashire. The plan was for a "simple but classy" day. I only gave myself 6 months to plan it so me and OH have been making decisions pretty rapidly and getting things done in our own little way.
I thought things were going reasonably well until last week we hit some issues with bridesmaids dresses. However the poo really hit the fan earlier this evening when my mum called and launched into a full blown rant about how she and the family hadn't been considered in any decisions, they hadn't had any input into any of the wedding plans, it seems like the whole wedding has just been "cobbled together," it's/I'm an embarrassment etc finishing with me being called "awful and rude" before she hung up the phone.
OK. So, I could have handled matters better and hindsight is a wonderful thing but, without going into details, I think I've been treated unfairly here. I've worked damn hard at getting as much planned as I have done and I've got some pretty good reasons to conclude that 95% what mother dear said to me was unjustified and just plain hurtful. What's more this has all been said 24 days before the wedding! Far too late for me to go back and change anything and close enough to the date for those words to still be fresh in my memory. It feels like the happy, laid back atmosphere I was hoping for on our wedding day has been ruined with one phone call.
Which brings me to the main reason for the post. What to do next? My knee-jerk response was to just not have my family at the wedding although I'm more than a bit angry at the moment so I accept that it's too soon to make that decision. It's too late to cancel the wedding as almost everything is paid for and I simply can't afford to lose that much money. I also love my OH more than chocolate so I'm determined not to let anything stop the wedding. I thought about writing my family a letter explaining my actions in planning the wedding and answering their criticisms and basically saying we'd like you at the wedding but only if you turn up with the right attitude. That way the ball is in their court and if I really am as evil as they seem to think then it's their decision not to be involved.
Sorry again for the length of the rant. Any advice or comments?