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March 12, 2006

Dum Dum Da-Dum

It's Bride Week!

Yep. It's Bride Week here with the Literary Chicks. In honor of my new book, UN-BRIDALED, which is a runaway bride/secret baby/cowboy/reincarnation book, we will be talking about brides all week. Feel free to talk about secret babies, cowboys and reincarnation amongst yourselves.

Why write a runaway bride book? Because it's quite possible I should have been one myself.

At my first wedding -- and that should be your first clue as to how well my first marriage went -- the glass didn't break. Nope. My husband-to-be brought his foot down on the linen-wrapped goblet and it shot out of the napkin, hit a wall, bounced and rolled a few feet without even getting a crack. We all stood and stared at it. The rabbi then picked it up, re-wrapped it and husband #1 stomped it, but good.

When that marriage fell apart, I began to wonder if that unbroken glass had been an omen. Maybe I should have run. From my 20/20 hindsight vantage point now, I can tell you that at the moment the glass didn't break, I knew everything about that man and me that would eventually destroy our relationship. So, realizing that writing novels can be cheap therapy, I wrote a book about a bride who looks down at the unbroken glass, sees it for the evil portent it is, picks up her skirts and skedaddles.

Even though the plot of UN-BRIDALED revolves around runaway brides, secret babies, cowboys and reincarnation, it actually is a book about moms and the lessons -- both good and bad -- that they teach us and how we decide what to hold onto and what to cast away.

I'm a mom. In a cliche worthy of every runaway bride/secret baby/cowboy or reincarnation book ever written, I will now tell you that being a mom is the most difficult job I will ever have. I am so lucky to have had a wonderful mother myself who, though she may have made mistakes from time to time, never let me forget for a second that she loved me and would always love me no matter what. I'm trying very hard to pass that particular lesson down to my children.

All of this is why it was such a shock last summer when I was helping my mother move. I was packing her copious collections of stemware and stumbled across a little glass that didn't match any of the others. When I asked about it, she said that a friend had given it to her to be the glass my father would smash under the wedding canopy.

I asked why it was still whole.

She said she'd chosen to use a lightbulb wrapped in a napkin instead to get a good resounding smash -- a lesson she clearly had opted not to pass down.

This blog was brought to you by Un-Bridaled, Eileen's hilarious new novel about a commitment-phobic bride and love on the run!

Posted by Eileen at 12:29 PM | Comments (3)

Comments

Posted by: Alesia Holliday at March 12, 2006 5:06 PM

Posted by: Eileen at March 13, 2006 11:50 AM

Posted by: Susan McB at March 16, 2006 4:06 PM