The Shotgun Wedding

So, yesterday was the day of my brother's shotgun wedding to his pregnant girlfriend. It was supposed to be a small and stress-free affair, but unless you run away and get married in secret with strangers as witnesses these things are never small and stress-free. It was made doubly problematic for us in that they had decided to get married where we live rather than where they live, so we couldn't even run away at the end of the day because everyone was staying with us. Sigh.

Boy oh boy. I think there must be something wrong with me, but I just can't cope with family gatherings. My own family is bad enough - not all of them, but certainly the close ones. And yes, I realise I'm probably going to hell for admitting it, and it probably indicates I have 'issues', but I don't care. It's all about keeping it real and that means admitting that when I'm in a room with my mum and brother for longer than about 30 minutes I want to kill them both.

When you add to my slightly dysfunctional irritated family a whole other dysfunctional divorced family from Holland and bear in mind that they are meeting for the very first time outside the chilly registry office, then you have an environment in which trouble could flare up at any moment. Throw into the mix a 6 months pregnant bride, a groom in a kilt, a windy day and lots of wine and the recipe for trouble is almost complete.

Sadly though, because I was quite looking forward to a post wedding punch up, or at least a good shouting match, the day passed off almost without incident and a good time was had by all. The only slight blot on the landscape was the bride's warring parents. It seems that the father left the mother when the 3 sisters were quite young and has since found himself another, younger wife. The mother is a grudge bearing mentalist and it has been difficult for the sisters to maintain relations with the father, not aided by his moving to Germany.

So the end of the day arrived and with it one drunk and sobbing sister, begging me (in Dutch) to invite the mother back to my house so that she could go and spend some time with her father without feeling guilty about the mother sitting alone in her B&B. By this stage I had my sights firmly set on my pyjamas, a re-run of the Great Escape and a nice cup of tea, not to mention that Himself was being a curmudgeonly old git and had already snuck off to string some zeds on the sofa. What could I do - I had to say yes, albeit through gritted teeth.

It then transpired that the boyfriend of the middle sister, in an extraordinary display of chivalry, had decided to accompany the mother so that she wouldn't feel bereft and abandoned by all the family. Excellent. I called a taxi. Then the middle sister decided to come too, being unable to leave her mother either. I ordered another taxi.

Upon arriving at the house in taxi one with the sister she broke down in sobbing hysterics feeling torn between two parents and upset that she may not see her father again for many months. The mother then arrived in taxi number two and the sister had to stop crying so that the mother would not know how upset she was. Sigh. They all then sat around drinking tea and coffee and smoking like chimneys while I desperately tried to think up ways of getting rid of them. Luckily my new sister-in-law provided the solution....

...she had left her maternity trousers in her mum's guest house that morning when she was getting changed, she had nothing else to wear and couldn't leave the hotel room without them. She too had been hoping to go out with the father. So it was that my mum had to take the Dutch crowd back to their B&B, collect my new sister-in-law's pregnancy pants and drive on to the honeymoon suite. The newly weds had by then given up as it was so late and ordered room service.

I went to the off-licence and bought a bottle of wine figuring that the only way to tip the exhaustion into complete numbness was booze.

Happy days...