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Confessions of a Former Bridezilla: Written in-Character as Juliet Hart (Forever Yours Book 3)

By Samantha Bayarr

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A Special Note from the Author:
This book is meant to be a companion book to Formerly Yours and is written from my character, Juliet Hart’s, point of view on her life as a former bridezilla. It can be viewed as a stand-alone book as a sort of fictional journal but is not meant for the purpose of giving expert advice on the subject. However, if it just so happens to tame the inner-bridezilla in you, well, then I’ve accomplished something other than offering some sideline entertainment to go along with Book Two of my Forever Yours collection.
Thank you for reading this book, as I hope it will offer a little back-story for my character that I did not want to include in the original book, because, let’s face it, she just isn’t this person anymore!

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Picture Perfect
Chapter 2: It Got Lost in the Mail
Chapter 3: Pack your bags, we’re going on a Guilt Trip
Chapter 4: I Do, but I Don’t
Chapter 5: Let them Eat Cake
Chapter 6: Call of Duty
Chapter 7: Do as I Say, Not as I Do
Chapter 8: Blame it on the Bridezilla
Chapter 9: Crow for Dinner & Humble Pie for Dessert
Chapter 10: Rescue Me

Picture Perfect

Chapter 1

You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect. Matthew 5:48

I’ve often wondered if there should be a Bridezillas Anonymous. I could walk in and stand in front of the crowd, state my business and tell my story.
Well, it goes a little something like this…
My name is Juliet Hart, and I’m a Bridezilla. It’s been seven years since my last tantrum…
I’ve had to ask myself more than once; how did I get here?
What brought me to the point of writing a book that would offer help for other women to tame their inner-bridezillas before it’s too late?
Being left at the altar was a pretty big clue, but when your ninety-year-old grandma tells you to take a chill-pill before she gets out of her wheelchair and teaches you a lesson, it’s probably time to sit up and take notice of your behavior.
Aside from that, I suppose I just sort of fell into it.
This book, which began as a journal of self-awareness, is all about confessions, so, I suppose I should start at the beginning…
My boyfriend and I had just graduated college, both of us in business administration, and everyone around us was celebrating by getting married. It made sense, after all. After graduating and starting our careers, getting married was the next logical step. At least that’s what we thought—or maybe it was just me. I remember that day turning to the guy I’d only been dating for a few months and saying, “Why don’t we get married?”.
He agreed with me!
We were young—very young, and that was our first mistake.
It was the mistake that would take me down a long and lonely journey to becoming the bridezilla of all bridezillas. I’d changed overnight into a person even I no longer recognized. Suddenly, nothing satisfied me and I had become a person so unbearable, I could barely stand to be around myself! I was out of control, but I didn’t care. I had a wedding to plan, and anyone who got in my way would be considered a casualty.
It didn’t start out that way; in the beginning, I was calm and happy and excited to be planning the wedding of my dreams. It was, after all, the wedding that I'd been planning since I was a daydreaming, twelve-year-old girl with stars in her eyes and love in her heart for a groom she hadn’t even met yet. I’d fixated so much on the wedding, I hadn’t realized the groom I’d met wasn’t the right one for me because we didn’t love each other enough to be getting married (more about that later).
Because I had it all planned out, I all-too-often found that my wedding planner only got in my way. After all, this was my wedding and I had been planning it for years; who else could possibly plan it better than I could?
Thinking back, it might have been better if I had let her plan the wedding. I could have saved myself the headaches and the crying and the MANY enemies I made, but then I wouldn’t have learned the lesson I learned, and I might not have discovered I had an inner-bridezilla before I met the right groom. Yes, I’m ashamed to admit this groom was not the groom for me.
I consider myself lucky to have had this test-run so that when I find the man who is meant to be my groom, I’ll have learned from this enough to prevent it from happening again.
At least that’s my ongoing prayer.
Let me tell you how I know he wasn’t the right groom for me…
My first clue was the fact that everything suddenly had to be PERFECT. There were no exceptions and no forgiveness for anything or anyone who wasn’t perfect when it came to my wedding. It was my dream-wedding, and nothing less than total perfection would satisfy me. Sadly, I never reached that stage where I said to myself, “This is perfect”.
Take my groom, for instance; all those little things I used to find cute about him or the things that made me laugh suddenly annoyed me and embarrassed me. Yes, I’d become embarrassed that the man I’d chosen to marry was not perfect—in my eyes, anyway. We began to fight about things that really didn’t matter. I fought with my family, his family, and my friends.
Suddenly, nothing mattered but the wedding.
If that isn’t a big red-flag eye-opener, I don’t know what is!
For me, I believe it became about control. I couldn’t control the fact that my groom had shattered my perfect image of him, or that our love wasn’t perfect, so my wedding had to be. Anything I could control, I tried my best to control it.
Real life doesn’t work that way, no matter how much I tried to make it happen.

My groom had tons of great ideas for our wedding theme, but I shot down every one of them. At that time, the word compromise was not in my vocabulary. Instead, I’d insisted on having the wedding I’d been putting together since I was twelve. To me, I thought that made me the expert, and I explained to him that his ONLY job was to show up at the wedding and say “I do” at the appropriate time, which he failed to do.
For any bridezilla, delegating menial tasks becomes fun, and anyone who will do your bidding is your best friend. Unfortunate for me, my groom was not my best friend—for any reason. Not only did I want him far away from my wedding, that I somehow lost sight of the most important thing about planning a wedding: having a groom. No matter how you slice it, you can’t have a wedding without a groom.
Period.
Suddenly, my groom, in his perfectly pressed tuxedo, no longer fit on top of that perfect four-tier cake because I’d knocked him off his pedestal. I wanted to be king of that cake-mountain, no matter what it cost.

For a grand-entrance effect, I insisted my groom ride up to the outdoor courtyard on the day of our wedding on a white horse. When he complained that he was allergic to horse-hair, I told him to buck-up and take an allergy pill an hour beforehand because I wanted my groom to be my “Knight” on a white horse.
Having a fairytale wedding is a good thing; just as long as you don’t lose sight of reality!
When your own selfish wants cause another person to experience pain, it’s time to take a step back and review your priorities. Though this isn’t the meanest thing I did when planning my wedding, I feel it’s important to tell you because the man you marry should be treated with respect, and even adored. If you don’t adore your groom to the point you don’t even notice the forlorn look on his face while you’re whirling around in bridezilla-ville, you’ve got bigger problems than imaginable. I didn’t notice that look until he was standing before me rejecting me at the altar. That look haunted me for five long years—until I finally accepted that my actions had put it there.

Former Bridezilla Tip #1
If I could tell myself one bit of advice, it would be to just let it go! Most of the stuff you will fret over will not matter once the wedding is over and the marriage begins—unless you’re not compatible with your groom like I wasn’t. You’ve heard it said that home is where your heart is; you’ll find contentment there too. My groom asked me which was more important to me; was it a perfect wedding or a perfect marriage? Choose wisely.
 


It Got Lost in the Mail

Chapter 2

Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment. Proverbs 12:19

When making out the guest list, there were people that I didn’t want at the wedding for various reasons, from obnoxious family members, to friends of my parents that I didn’t know. So, when mailing the invitations, I sorted them into two categories: those I mailed, and those I threw away, making certain they would never reach their destination. For those not welcome at the wedding, I switched their invitation with an announcement, making sure a gift would arrive in place of the unwanted guest.
If I had to pinpoint what it was exactly that made me snap, I would have to say that it was the grueling task of making the guest list. Because my parents were paying for the wedding, they had insisted that relatives I hadn’t seen since I was a child be invited to my wedding, along with friends they’ve had for years; these were people that I didn’t associate with, but had only agreed to invite them to attend simply because they were wealthy enough to shower me with expensive gifts.
What my mother didn’t find out until later, was that I had switched a good number of the invitations with an announcement to be sure that the gift would be sent. I'd had the announcements printed up at the same time as the invitations, and the announcements had come with an apology explaining the lack of space to accommodate guests. This, of course, was not true, since the Waldorf can accommodate several hundred wedding guests, but I had my own agenda where the guest list was concerned. Although I wanted automatic admirers, I wanted them to be fun, and my parents’ friends were not fun people.
For this offense, if we were back in the old days, my father would have likely taken me out to the barn and had a talk with me that my backside wouldn’t let me forget for at least a week.
My own contribution to the guest list included women I hadn’t seen since high school whom I didn’t necessarily like for one reason or another, but I’d simply wanted to show off my perfect princess wedding at the Waldorf.
Naturally, my guest list consisted of various women whose simple weddings didn’t measure up to mine, providing me with the perfect opportunity to show them up. The entire wedding had turned into a show in which I was the star.

As bridal gifts began to trail in, I opened every one of them, and when I found a gift that either wasn’t on the registry or what I wanted, I sent them back with a note telling the giver the exact gift I’d wanted, where to purchase it and the cost. I also included a little side note explaining they would not be permitted to attend the wedding without one of the gifts from my registry.
When receiving gifts before the wedding, you’re supposed to wait until after the wedding and open the gifts as a couple.
All I can say in my defense is: my mother should never have trusted me with those gifts.
Shame on her!
Truthfully, the real shame fell on me.
When I think back on it, I’m surprised there were guests sitting on the bride’s side of the aisle. My bad behavior seemed to draw them in more. Perhaps the joke had been on me and they all knew my groom was about to run out on me, and they were all eager to be there to witness it.
It would have served me right.

Former Bridezilla Tip #2
Never look a gift-horse in the mouth!
Finding fault with a gift is very insulting, and by complaining about it, you may find yourself with nothing in the end—or worse. If you’re lucky, you won’t end up with gag gifts—you know the kind—the ones that smell so bad they make you gag when you open them!
When someone goes out of their way to hand-pick a gift for you, it’s customary to thank them—a lesson that took me five long years to learn. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Practice gratitude.

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