Sigh, my fucking family.
So, this weekend was my brothers wedding. This is kind of a big deal. The whole process for me involved packing my wife and kids into an inadequatley sized vehicle, driving the dire drive from north to south Wales, stopping with my parents, then carrying on with them to darkest Cornwall in the west of England for the ceremony.
Things go wrong from the beginning. The journy down took 8 hours, with many, many stops for vomiting kids and wife. My parents begin the usual "undermining" they do with my kids, constantly overriding me and spoiling them so much that they are supported in being openly rude to me. When we finally get to Cornwall, the overnight hotel has got the room boking wrong and I end up sleeping in a fold up bed in a corridor. We get unsympathetically kicked out of our room/corridor an hour early due to double booking thanks to my dad's total lack of diplomacy. When we arrive at the wedding venue, we are told that the bride (who I detest for good reasons, but thats a whole different story) was not happy with the bridal suite and instead took the family room, which was our booking. This left us with knowhere to finish getting ready. Finally scabbing a room for an hour from the brother-in-law of the bride (whom I had never met but who was the only guy willing to help - incidentally he is in the armed forces) we were able to finish getting my kids and wife ready, 25 mins after the ceremony was due to start. Did I mention that my kids were the bridesmaids and I was supposed to open the service with a reading? A reading which was locked in my car hundreds of miles away?
So by now the bride is crying as her day has been ruined and I appear like some kind of cock though no fault of my own. Up I rock to wing the reading like a boss and somehow pull off some anecdote by Feynman to massive appluase and laughter. In walkes the bride with my daughters, and her dad quietly apologises for the fuss caused by his bridezilla of a daughter. Phew thinks I, this might be getting better. LOLNOPE. As people disperse to go make merry after the ceremony, my Mum (already drunk from 4 bottles of wine since breakfast - she has issues) strides over to my wife (who looked radiant despite all the problems so far) and declares loudly to all the assembled people that she considers my wife to be little better than a common prostitute. People are looking at her in disbelief as she staggers off, and my wife is left open mouthed and shocked, before laughing it off, but I know that she is hurt. During the speeches my dad openly criticise my life choices opposed to my brothers, and brags about how much money he supports him with whilst I deserve nothing - I have no idea why he considers his successful academic son who has asked for nothing from him ever such a dissapointment when compared to the drop out son who is marrying into money who has needed constant bailing out the last 5 years. My bitch of a mother repeats her comments 4 seperate times, before my wife simply has had enough and runs off to our last moment replacement room (costing me an extra £160) crying. As she makes her escape she falls on a hidden step, badly twisting or spraining her ankle and badly bruising her hip, leaving her hardly able to walk. Cutting our losses we decide it is time for bed, before getting out of there and home the very next day.
The next morning no apology is forthcoming from my mother - not even some pathetic effort to blame it on the drink. She is over the top extra nice under the critical glare of all assembled, but I can not speak to her - there is no way I am going to be the one responsible for turning his wedding day into a domestic blow out. On the way home somehow we suffer not one, not two, but three punctures, setting me back another £200 in replacement tyres to find that my wifes brother is being rushed to hospital having suffered an accident in work that has caused him to lose his sight. Oh, and my back door appears to have been kicked in for some reason.
FML Bay12, FML.