Focus on the Marriage

Every morning I wake up almost overwhelmed with the amount of work that goes into planning a wedding weekend and hometown reception. I get as much done as I can, and then attempt to shut my mind off at night so I can fall asleep. So many other things keep getting pushed off to the side, and I end up making a lot of excuses for the non-wedding areas I keep falling short in. I don't wash my face before I go to bed, my room is a mess of wedding supplies and packages, I haven't started packing for a cross-country move I am making in 3 weeks (I don't have that much to take, but still) and somehow I still haven't applied for that perfect job opportunity that a friend emailed me about a few weeks ago. Sometimes Mr. Avocado and I only end up speaking for 10-15 minutes a day because I can't think of anything to talk about other than wedding stuff and we just get stressed out.

All of this craziness has led me to develop a mantra that I try to repeat multiple times a day:

Don't focus so much on the wedding that you forget about the marriage.

For me, the marriage stands for everything that will happen after the ceremony, Hotel 1000 festivities, honeymoon, and hometown reception. It's back to life, back to reality, back to the good stuff.

However, that doesn't mean that I can put all of the other stuff on hold until that time comes. I need to focus on my health, my spirituality, and my relationships right now, because those things are so much more important than a pretty cake or a violinist at the ring ceremony will ever be. I want the wedding to be an event that takes place in the life I am already living to the fullest, not the culmination of what I once was, or the brink of what I am about to become. Sometimes I need to remember to just breathe.

Drew Barrymore taught me to "Just breathe" in one of my favorite movie scenes of all time.