Fatal Flaw

Preface

Student 1: "What's your name going to be after you're married?"
Me: "Coach Prater"
Student 2: "I'm still going to call you Schrodt."
Me: "That's fine."
Student 1: "You can't call her Schrodt anymore because after she gets married, she'll belong to her husband."
Me: (with head shaking and a look of disbelief) Silence.

In literature, heroes of stories generally have what is termed a "fatal flaw." In other words, the one characteristic that ultimately leads to his/her downfall or at least causes them numerous problems. Every time I think of Odysseus or Caesar or any other famous character, I can't help but wonder what would be my fatal flaw. I assume each of you reading this can probably think of numerous options, but it has taken me planning a wedding to finally pinpoint my issue.

I am proud. I am cocky. I think I am better than you. I think I will win at everything. I have unrealistic expectations about the world around me, because I am certain I can do anything better than you. I am your stereotypical alpha human who cannot understand her own shortcomings. I have come to this conclusion through a couple of different wedding events, the main one being the name game.

As part of our wedding, we are going to have a friend of ours make t-shirts for all of the wedding party. They are going to be much like a jersey (imagine that, here I am back to competing) with numbers and last names on the back. I immediately knew what number I wanted (my number from high school) and logically wrote down "Schrodt" as the name that should go on the back. It took me around 3 days to realize that the shirt that I create in honor of my wedding should probably have my NEW last name on the back, rather than my current last name. Why is this so hard for me to get? Why am I not giddy at the thought of being Mrs. Cody Prater? Why do I not practice writing my new name? Why do I not want to change my name? Because I think my name is worth something...

I am slowly trying to come to peace with the idea that changing my name is not my submission to a man or society for that matter. I know that Cody is not one of those men that bosses a woman around and expects her to answer to him. I know that hyphenating or not changing my name will only perpetuate the "she thinks she's something else" attitude that I am certain some people have about me. I know this is something that 9 out of 10 women do without hesitation. I know that years from now I won't blink an eye at Katy Prater. But for now, I am saddened at the end of an era. I can't help but want to hold on to Katy Schrodt for as long as I can. I want to revel in the difficulty of it's spelling and the ridiculousness of the nicknames it opened doors to (Scrotum) and the constant mispronunciation I have encountered for years. My name will come with me to married life. Perhaps I will not sign it or say it or introduce myself twice because no one can understand it the first time, but deep inside I will always hear the magical chant of "Schrodt, Schrodt, Schrodt" and think back to a simpler, less chaotic time in life when I had only one (actually 4, dang it) name to go by.

"New Lala's"

For Easter, my family and I went to my grandmother's house as we do every Easter. My uncle recently married a woman who is different than the general Schrodt personality, but someone we all like a lot nonetheless. After dinner my mother, my new aunt (I've known her maybe 6 months) and myself decided to walk around the block. We began talking about wedding stuff and eventually found our way to the topic of wedding showers (a wedding tradition I don't get too excited about). We told her the date for the shower we are having for family and friends and she then asked me if I was going to have a personal shower. I immediately began dancing around the question because 1. I don't know for sure when or where or what kind of personal shower I will have and 2. I think it's an awkward event to discuss with my mother and a woman who I don't know too terribly well. However, in true non-Schrodt fashion my aunt went on to say that I must have a personal shower because I have to get some "new lala's." Gulp. Did you just say new lala's? To me? In front of my mother? Oh weddings, you exhaust me.

Mind you, still today I am not exactly sure what "new lala's" are. My sexual ignorance has cropped up at numerous points among this planning adventure and occasionally makes for an awkward encounter amongst people who make assumptions about Cody and me. I responded to my aunt with some casual response about ironing out those plans closer to the wedding, when I wanted to explain to her that I don't need NEW lala's, I think I need lala's in general. Even recounting this story makes me uncomfortable.

This experience with my aunt made me even less excited about the shower portion of a wedding. The normal family and friends shower with blenders as gifts will be painful enough. But the execution of a personal shower will be quite the feat to pull off without the most ridiculous amount of uncomfortable lala comments.

Who wants a personal shower anyway? Who came up with the idea of getting numerous women together (a lot of which I don't talk to on a daily basis about anything, much less lala's) to give someone stuff to wear (or not wear) while having sex? WHAT?!?!? So weird. I went to a personal shower once that was without a doubt one of the most painful experiences of my life. The group of people who were at this thing did not know each other well enough to sit and discuss someone else's sex life. The bride responded to each opening of lingere with the same somewhat overwhelmed faked excitement. We all tried to come up with something to talk about with the large penis cake in the room acting as the enormous elephant none of us knew how to overcome to socialize like normal adults. It was awful. It was weird. It was so weird that months later I still am scared of a personal shower. If I want sexy lingere, I will get myself lingere. If I want massage lotions, I can also get that. And if I want nipple tassles, I will disguise myself and find my way to the adult superstore and purchase those nipple tassles on my own.

I have hit the point where the events of this wedding are exhausting me. I don't want new lala's. And I'm probably not the bow type. Wearing a wedding dress is probably going to be a pretty big stretch for me. At some point, I wonder where you draw the line and decide the traditional things that people do, don't have to be the things that you do. Getting my lala's in the first place will be complicated enough. I need the lala's everyone else assumes I have before I can imagine getting creative with them.

Updates...

I have a really hard time finding things to write about lately. You would assume that the closer you get to an actual wedding date, the more you would have to do. When in reality there is a weird lull that occcurs between the beginning and the end of marriage...I meant the end of wedding planning, but I think the original comment is pretty true as well. Anyhoo...

Let's do some updates: my invitations are in my possession, the majority of the addresses are also in my possession, I have ordered stamps, and I am really excited about how the invites turned out. In my attempt to make my wedding English themed, I have tried really hard to keep the invitation aspect under control. If I had an unlimited budget, I would go crazy on the paper aspect of my wedding. I love calligraphy and letterpress and clever wording and all that is a wedding invitation. However, I feel like I have hit the highpoints of the invitations that meant the most to me, so I am happy with the end product. You will all be receiving them soon!

My dress should be in Rogers by the beginning of April. I am very excited about this concept and glad that when I try it on this time around, I will be at least a little thinner than I was the first time around. All good things.

Cody and I took engagement pictures last Wednesday with Jeremy Cavness out of Bentonville. We had a lot of fun and are really excited to see the pictures. The entire engagement pictures idea was a bit daunting to me at the beginning. Trying to capture love within a still shot seems to be a task that usually leads to 900 pictures of people kissing in different outfits. Neither Cody or myself are into the kissing picture idea, and I feel like we still had a good time and captured some of our own personality and style...hopefully.

In other news that does not have to do directly with my wedding, my best friend Katie is recently engaged to her boy toy A.J. I am super excited and happy for both of them. I think they will make an awesome married couple and seem to be on the path to many years of happiness together. I have known Katie since literally we were like 5 years old. Our paths crossed again in high school and we hit it off as the best of friends. It seems like yesterday I was illegally driving her car down 6th street to visit our friend Art and get into all of the trouble we could find. I appreciate friends like Katie and I am very happy she has a found a guy as nice as A.J. It is so weird to me the way life ends up. I would have never guessed as a sophomore in high school Katie and I would be in the situations we are in (engaged, careers, houses, adult lifes). I am glad to have a friend still around who experienced high school with me. In a way Katie and I will be forever a part of the halls of Southside High School, despite the fact that we have both moved far beyond those years. It's good to have old friends to recount the times that were good. Hopefully, there will be many more years to recount in the future.

On a purely selfish note, I am happy Katie got engaged because I get to relive the wedding planning experience from the outside in and I am a little relieved about that. Good luck to you, my friend!

T minus three months until I am officially hitched. Woohoo!

"Scars are souvenirs you never lose..."

I think it's interesting the way things that seem so inconsequential at one point in your life sometimes find their way back into the picture years later. Allow me to explain...

When I was in 9th grade, I was quite the studious youngster, as some of you can probably imagine. I made all A's. I followed every request of my teachers regardless of how silly or unnecessary it might have seemed. I studied. I worried if I did badly on a test. I was a model student (By the way, I was the type of student I assumed I would have a classroom full of one day as an educator. Not true.). One night after a basketball game, I went home to begin my homework. It ended up being around 10:30p.m. when I decided that I wanted an apple to eat as I frantically tried to study for my Civics test that was scheduled for the next day. I went downstairs after everyone else in my house had already gone to bed and sliced an apple using an apple cutter. The slices of the apple did not clearly separate from the cutter, so I flipped it over and preceded to tap each of the apple slices out. Unfortunately, I tapped too hard and sliced the edge of my middle finger of my left hand off. And when I say off, I mean off. Not good.

I remember seeing a lot of blood and part of my finger laying on the plate amidst a half sliced apple. I knew the situation was bad and probably needed some sort of medical attention considering the amount of blood that was literally pouring from me. However, being the one in a million 14 year old that I was, the only thought that ran through my head was "don't make too much noise because if my mom walks in here, I will have to go to the emergency room." Mind you, I didn't want to go to the emergency room because I needed to study for my Civics test. What in the world was I thinking? Even I think I was crazy looking back on the situation. I decided to wrap a roll of paper towels around my hand and just ignore my finger issue. I studied for that test and eventually fell asleep with still an entire roll of paper towels on my wound.

The next morning I woke up to a blood soaked stack of paper towels still wrapped around my poor finger. I had to wet them to be able to pull them away from my finger. Beneath the mess of crimson towels was the bone of my middle finger still slowly dripping blood. I remember literally crying from the pain but still making sure not to let on that my finger was as injured as it was, so as not to miss my Civics test...

I don't even remember that stupid test. I don't know what I made on it (I would guess an A). I don't even know what the subject matter is we were covering. But I do remember my apple massacre. I still look down at my hand and have to giggle at the memory of me as a 14 year old. However, I never paid too much attention to the scar until I got engaged. Now every time I sprawl my left hand out in front of some female onlooker I don't look at my ring for long. Instead, I look at that stupid middle finger all curved and uneven. It bothers me. It will be in pictures for the rest of my life. A digital memory of adolescent Katy. It's weird.

It's strange to me that on the same hand there can be so many stories that tell so much about me. There is my discoloration on top of my hand from me rubbing a pencil eraser across it until it burned my skin off in 3rd grade (my long time crush was doing the same thing. Peer pressure, dang it.) There's my swollen knuckle from where I broke my finger playing basketball in the 8th grade. There's my curved pinky finger from popping my fingers for years. And now there's a ring on the one finger on my hand that I have not cut open or jammed or broken or done something to. And now that finger tells a story of the past 5 years of Cody and me. My left hand encompasses years of my life and now will always stand as a symbol of my life with Cody.

When I cut my finger off, I couldn't see far enough ahead of me to know that the emergency room could have reattached my finger to avoid me cringing 9 years later at the sight of my left hand. Although the older I get the more I realize it's the scars you don't take the time to avoid that end up meaning the most to you. Here's to a flawless ring finger amidst the stories of the scars on my hands. Perhaps I spared my ring finger from erasers and apple cutters because I knew there would be a purpose for it eventually.

It's too late to be blogging.

Save the Dates

So, one of my biggest undertakings thus far in the wedding planning process has been my Save the Dates. I feel like they deserve a bit of an explanation for various reasons.

First off, I did not intend on creating save the dates at all. I felt like it's somewhat pretentious of me to think that people need to know months and months in advance when I am getting married so they can be certain to be there. I just don't feel like I have that much pull in this world. However, I was given a surprise 19th birthday party (I am not placing blame on anyone for this) in the basement of my parents' home a few years ago where approximately 8 people showed up. It was painful and awkward and something I vowed to avoid at all costs ever again. There is a part of me that is worried that those doors are going to open for me to walk down that aisle to a church of 8 people (okay there would probably be more than 8). Either way, I want people to come to my wedding. I do.

In the midst of my wedding planning, I have become an avid reader of some wedding blogs. I didn't even know wedding blogs existed before I got engaged, but they are addictive. One day I came across a save the date idea that a groom oddly enough had created. The concept of this couple's STD (haha, I just realized the acronym for save the date is STD. I will be using that from now on!)was What John and Sue will be doing the 189 days leading up to getting married. It was funny. The groom explained his idea was to document their engagement through Facebook status update sort of snippets. It was random stuff they were supposedly doing like starting wedding diets and watching specific TV shows.

I decided the idea was really clever. I then took it a step further and decided to make ours about our relationship leading up to the engagement, rather than the time after we got engaged. I spent a few hours writing it (I loved this part and would suggest anyone else to do the same thing if you want to remember the good stuff about you and your significant other). Cody even got involved and as you would assume thought of some really funny lines. I then had to print them and go through the unbelievable process of proofreading all that junk!

In the end, I love our STD's (hehe). I think they're cute and very Cody and Katyesque. I realized that they became really personal throughout the process though and felt somewhat weird about sending them to acquaintances that I am planning on inviting. I was afraid people who don't closely know Cody and me would be a little freaked out by a card that provides too much information. So if you did not receive a save the date, don't assume that means we're not inviting you to the wedding. I mainly sent the STD's to people that I really felt close to.

If you'd like to see the save the dates my superstar MOH posted some pics of them to her blog at http://theschluter.blogspot.com/. You should defintely go check them out!

Ghosts of Valentine's Day Past

So, I teach 15 year olds on a daily basis. I often have students assume I am much older than I am. I have kids ask me how many children I have. I have kids who think I was born in the 70's (1986 folks!). In other words, I have kids who obviously have a very skewed perception of who I am. It doesn't really bother me that much when someone assumes I am older than I am. I do have an occasional moment where I refer to "Saved by the Bell" or the Spice Girls (yes, I reference the Spice Girls while teaching English) and my kids look at me with the blankest of stares and I realize that I am not 15 years old anymore. But overall, I am still young enough to not worry too much about the age game...most of the time.

Today I was sitting in the gym with about 6 of my 9th grade girls who just recently completed their jr. high basketball season. We were not practicing today so I was just talking to them about different things to do with school. One of my kids asked me what my husband ("I'm not married yet, Emily") was going to get me for Valentine's Day. I realized a couple of things in this moment:

My immediate frustration and correction of the word husband was somewhat unwarranted because in less than 6 months, I will have a husband (who am I?). I also realized that I will probably get flowers for Valentine's Day which is good and great, yet somewhat predictable. I couldn't help but think back to the Valentine's Days Cody and I have spent together where there was so much more than flowers as a gift. And then it happened....

With six 15 year old faces staring back at me, I literally quoted my mother: "Girls, after 5 years of being with the same guy, the gifts only get smaller." It's a phenomenon my mother and I have discussed before regarding how everything that involves extra effort in a relationship shrinks over time. And all of the things that sort of annoy you at the beginning of being together, slowly annoy you to the point of wanting to scream at someone. I don't want to scream at Cody very often. I don't even think he does that many things that annoy me. However, I do have to admit that the super cute things that Cody once did for me on a fairly regular basis have somewhat dwindled. In Cody's defense though, I am certain the extra stuff I used to do for Cody has also become more rare. I think it's human nature to stop working so hard when you realize that what you've got is pretty good.

When I mentioned this deep, philosophical relationship process to my 9th graders, they all looked at me like I was sort of crazy. They are still receiving texts from boys asking them to "go out," which never results in any actual going out. They have never gotten past the point in a relationship where the nice stuff ends. So, in an attempt to not sound like my mom and to not be the overly negative adult, I told the sweetest stories about Cody's past Valentine's Day gift ideas. And we all giggled and laughed and commented about how "hot" my boyfriend is.

The bell eventually rang and the kids left the gym. As one of my students started walking away, she turned to me and said "thank you." I asked her what she was thanking me for and she said "letting us hear about a couple that works." It struck me that a 9th grader could pinpoint that I'm in a relationship that works. Sometimes I get caught up in the big to do of wedding planning and working and coaching and all that is life and forget to just appreciate that I have a good, honest guy that will always come home to me (one day). The same kid told me she liked talking to me because I always seem to know the answers. I felt like such a fraud. I wanted to tell her that I am just as lost as she is. I literally reverted back to Chaffin Junior High on Valentine's Day when everyone got flowers and balloons and teddy bears from some hormone-driven boy they were "going out" with and I never did. I realized in that moment that to 9th graders at the school I teach, I'm the girl who gets the flowers. I am that older person who appears as if they have it figured out. And this is when I felt old. It's not the hypothetical children questions or assumptions that I graduated from high school in the 90's that bother me. But I felt old. I was the 9th grade English teacher that I used to idolize as a 9th garer. It was weird. I don't know what happen to the space between sweaty hand holding and marriage. Either way, perhaps life is about at least looking like you've got it figured out and I was happy to know I had sold the idea to someone, even if they're 15 and very impressionable.

So, this Valentine's Day when those flowers land on my doorstep, I will appreciate that I have a guy who remembers to send flowers. And I will accept that not everything within a relationship has to have bells and whistles...

I sure do love bells, though.

Yichud's for everyone!

Okay, so I feel as if there are a million things I could update about but I don't really get into capturing every tiny detail about this process. I will tell you this: we began registering, we bought a house (this one will perhaps get an entire entry one day), Cody's attire is 90% certain, and my flowers are chosen and booked.

Beyond these things, I have also decided on a tradition that I assume will begin and end with my wedding experience. I am so very excited about the gathering of people that I hope will take place at my wedding. I want friends and family to gather and talk and laugh and celebrate life and love and all of that good stuff. I want my parents to be proud and happy for what Cody and I have accomplished. I want friends to be reunited after too long. I want all of this. I want my guests to walk away from our wedding feeling like they have truly had a good time. However, I also want Cody and me to walk away from our wedding feeling as if there were some special moments just for me and him. In the craziness of that day, I am certain it will be easy for me (not Cody because nothing stresses him out) to be crazy and flustered and frustrated with the chaos of the entire situation. Because I know I have a tendency to be a bit serious (this is code for mean) under pressure, I have found in the ever-reaching wedding blogosphere (is this a word?) a tradition that I absolutely love the idea of.

In traditional Jewish weddings, the bride and groom steal away for a few minutes after the ceremony is finished and they are alone in a room. It is called a Yichud (I could very well be using this term incorrectly) and the idea is that the bride and groom can presumably be together alone for the first time since they are now married (I'd like to think this is when Jews have sex for the first time, just for the sake of the story). I want to do this (not the have sex in a room moments after I get married part, but the be alone with Cody after the ceremony part). I want for me and Cody to sit and breathe and giggle alone for just a few minutes while the hustle and bustle of the day continues without us. I want to hear his commentary about the ceremony and hold his hand with his wedding band between my fingers and tell him he looks dashing in his recently selected wedding attire and just be for a minute with him to bask in the greatness of that fleeting moment. The older I get the more I realize I run through life like a crazy person and rarely stop to take it all in. Just once and only for a second I want to be forced to take it all in.

So I have decided that Cody and I will steal a little tradition from the Jews. We will sneak off for a moment of reflection so that neither of us look back and wonder where the day went, even though I am certain we will both do that anyway. I think I will put CP in charge of the selection of the sneaking off place. He's always been good at that sort of stuff. Go Jews! Until next time...