An uphill battle

I never thought planning this wedding would go according to plan. Everyone told me it would be stressful, and I've watched enough of Bridezillas to know there has to be something that makes these women insane.

For some, it may be flowers. For others, it's the dress. Maybe the cake, photographer, or caterer.

For me, it's the officiant.

When we first starting planning the wedding, I knew one thing for certain: Where the ceremony would take place. My mom is/was hell bent on having a Catholic mass ceremony, and I knew if we were going to do that, we had to have it at the same church my parents were married in. It was the only place I would even entertain to get married at.

We are not parishioners of this church, but actually getting married there wasn't going to be a problem, as long as we paid twice the amount we would have paid elsewhere, they'd marry us. Great.

"But you'll need to find an officiant."

Okay. How hard can it be?

Oh, how naive I was! I really thought this would be a cinch. But the pastor from my church was going to be in Europe during June 2011. And deacons can't say a mass. That left the other church. But wait, even though it isn't my church and we're paying buttloads of money to use it for one hour, I still had to contact their priests! Okay! I can do that!

Except their priest? Really bad at getting back to people. Like, awful. I mean, for someone who has to talk to people all the time, you'd think he'd be better at interpersonal communication.

After multiple attempts by both myself and the wedding coordinator of the church, the priest FINALLY called me back. Except I was in class at the time and couldn't answer. So he had to leave a message. And when I went to call him back not even 15 minutes later, he was out of the office. So I had to leave a message.

And I never heard back from him. Apparently a few phone messages was enough, because the church let us book, and we paid a deposit. But, a couple months later, the wedding coordinator contacted me to let me know our officiant had left that church. He left us one way of getting in touch with him: A single, solitary email address.

And this brings us back to where we are now. A couple weeks ago, I sent our officiant an email to we could set up a time to meet. Given his track record, I figured I should start early. But when I didn't hear back from him after several attempts over a month period, I started to get nervous. I broke down and emailed the wedding coordinator, who so gracefully informed me she hadn't heard from him either, and I better get to lookin' for a new one.

So now we are officiantless, as we were several months ago. I'm trying not to panic, but I can finally understand why so many brides lose it. When you spend so much time, energy, and money into organizing one day, it's easy to get pretty upset when someone messes with it.

If it were anything else, I think I might react better. You can always get a new dress, flowers can be fixed, and the cake isn't that important. But the officiant? He actually marries you. Pretty important.

So, hey, Archdiocese of New Orleans? I need a new officiant, over here.