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The vow of silence…

So today was interesting… I slept until just before noon, got up, showered, and talked to my mom about the whole situation last night.  I finally got to explain my position to someone!  WOOT!  (Tom was at work.)  She understood but was so depressed that her husband and her son weren’t getting along that she stayed home from work today.  … … Now if you know my mom, you’ll know that she plays off the guilt trip card quite a bit, but I think that the staying home dealio was more of a “I didn’t sleep last night and didn’t feel like getting up at 5am for work” thing than a “I’m so depressed that I called in sick” thing.  Although she claimed the latter.

At least I got to apologize to my mom for last night and explain how frustrated I get when attempting to talk to Tom.  She said that she understood and could see that, but also said that I wasn’t listening to him either.  Now normally I’m all about listening to my faults, but I don’t believe this is one that “accidently” happened on my part last night.  I CHOSE not to listen to him and walked away due to him forcefully over powering anything I had to say.  So I didn’t apologize for that, and I’d do it again.

In the end I decided that the approach I will take is as follows:  I will discuss, negotiate, compromise with my mother as much as she desires.  I will discuss with Tom ONLY if he agrees to not interrupt me at ANY POINT!  If he does, I’ll explain to him prior that I will raise my hand as a signal as to what happened, and I will walk away.  I refuse to let myself get that frustrated again.  Not for this… not with him…

So apparently now he’s taken up the silent treatment to me.  He DID say “hey” when he walked in from work, and “oh” when I said that I went shopping for lightbulbs for the basement today.  But other than that he’s avoided me and I’ve done the same to him… At one point I was standing in the kitchen and he walked in through the outside door carrying a tub of equipment from work.  He then yelled for my mom and asked her to come close the door… …. … I was standing 8 feet from the door.  She was not even in the same room.  Real mature.

My mom is concerned he’ll not want to pay for the rehearsal dinner now… He’s really mad that we’re not wanting to invite 1/10 of our guest list as “People we don’t have a clue who they are” and spend 380 some bucks on em… Just becuase they invited my mom to their kids’ weddings… I asked her if they were the mother’s of the brides (thus meaning THEY were paying for it) and she said yes they all were except one who was the mother of the groom but she wasn’t invited to that one because it was so far away… So the point being that they made the conscious choice to pay for her.  My mom is trying to make the choice for Sarah’s parents to pay for them all…. that’s not right either… and it’s not right to make us fit that into our previously set budget!

So my theory is this:

Tom wants to be in control of the situation.  He may say that if we don’t invite them, that he’ll not pay for the rehearsal dinner.  Fine.  If he doesn’t do that, we cut him, all my mom’s work buddies, and all of his family from the guest list… We add the rehearsal dinner cost into our budget, and in the end we SAVE MONEY!  He WILL NOT control OUR wedding… This is crazy!  I just can’t stand watching a grown man act like a 5 year old and hold grudges.  If he wants to whine, I’ll just cut him out of it all!

Grrr… I’m still frustrated (as you can tell), and it’s not right that I have to fight tooth-and-nail for my own freaking wedding day… This reception is a party that is supposed to be a joyous occassion where we celebrate that Sarah and I are married… not a social event for all the work buddies of my mom who we have never even MET!

In the end, I offerred a compromise.  We’ll accept 3-4 of her friends with their spouse or a guest.  This is 6-8 people of the 24 originally desired.  That will fill a full table of people we don’t know, who don’t know us either.  That I can live with.  I CAN’T allow 3 full tables of “who are you?” to happen.  Especially when she’s not paying for a lick of that night!

I still have yet to hear a reply.

Mood:  ::sigh:: Is it over yet?