Paper Trail

I’m feeling a little better today, thanks to the twice-daily dose of drugs that hopefully are not messing up the little person growing inside me. Armed with a nausea-reducing travel mug full of Keifer and a constipation-reducing Fiber One bar, I ventured on yet another wedding-related errand: the stationary store.

It has finally dawned on me that our wedding is not going to be the cake-and-champagne-in-a-picnic-shelter-in-a-nice-park-type-affair that I’d imagined we could throw for, like $5,000. We have numerous meals and tons of logistics and multiple means of transportation and, clearly, a dress that’s going to cost more than $15.

All of a sudden yesterday the plan of D.I.Y.ing our wedding invitations seemed not just daunting, exhausting, and taxing in my newly nauseous state, but kind of not fair. My 13-year-old future half-brother-in-law had invitations that look like tuxedos made for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah. Yes, it might have been more his mother’s doing than his own, but still, shouldn’t I be allowed to have invitations made for my wedding? I don’t need them to be engraved or even letter-pressed, and I don’t need envelopes inside of envelopes inside of envelopes with ribbons and shiny lining and all that crap. I just need them to look like I didn’t make them myself with Microsoft Word clip art.

The woman at the stationary store was perfect—a young woman who collects old ephemera and would be thrilled—seriously thrilled—to come up with the design I have in mind, based on antique train tickets. (Did I mention that one of the means of transportation at our wedding is an antique steam train?) She’ll make an invite with a tear-off RSVP card attached to the bottom. There’s perforation involved, which adds a few hundred dollars, of course, but I figured out I can do that myself with a sewing machine or some sort of roll-y tool that I’m sure is available somewhere on the internet. I can handle that much D.I.Y., even in my current condition.

It feels so good to have someone helping—someone with the tools and the skills and the know-how, not to mention the unbridled enthusiasm for all things wedding. I got kind of lonely making our save-the-date cards, just me and my jam-prone laser printer and the sound of my own voice cursing.

Dr. Fiancé asked where exactly the bulk of the cost of the invitations comes from, and I explained we were mostly paying for someone else’s design work. “So it’s like art?” he asked. “We can hang one of them on the wall later?” Unclear whether he was being sarcastic.

Either way, he gave the project the thumbs-up and quickly busied himself looking for train-themed stamps on the internet.