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have to spend a hundred bucks a head, but…I mean, $15,000 for food and drink really isn’t that much.”
    Oops.
    Brides, take heed: never, ever tell your self-employed, freelance-writer mother whose royalty payments only come twice a year that any sum of money “isn’t that much.” For that matter, don’t say those words to any mother. She didn’t get to where she is by ignoring the realities of budget.
    The conversation spiraled downward from there. At one point, my mom said $5,000 was a perfectly adequate amount for a wedding, to which I replied that I would need twenty times that amount to have the wedding I wanted. That’s right—I heard myself requesting $100,000 for my Big Day in the middle of a conversation that started out with her offering to pay me off for eloping.
    I mean, really. My parents had generously paid my tuition for one of the most expensive private undergraduate institutions in the country. I blithely ignored the fact that putting me through said college meant that they had to hold off on traveling the world and buying a new home—one they had been saving for since before I was born. In their minds, they were financing a degree that would exponentially improve my life. Setting that aside, I stupidly told my mother that an ostentatious wedding would definitely improve my life!
    I tried telling her that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. was close to $30,000, to which she responded with the oldest momtrick in the book: “I don’t care what everyone else is doing. I’m your mother and I say you can do better than everyone else.”
    She reminded me that $100,000 spent on one day amounted to a down payment on a starter home. Two years’ tuition at business school. A small fleet of new hybrid cars with all the trimmings. When I replied that I had no immediate plans to purchase a home, I’d get a scholarship for my MBA and I didn’t need a car, she upped the ante and figured out that a hundred grand would feed four hundred children in Ghana for a year.
    And what could I say to that? She was right.
    I got off the phone with her that day feeling shaken. Suddenly, my dream wedding felt impossibly out of reach. Worse, though, I experienced a frighteningly adult sensation of personal responsibility and conscience. My wedding fantasy had turned me into someone I barely knew—a person who was grasping and entitled, a person who had forgotten that any sum of money my parents gave us for the wedding was a gift.
    The sum to underwrite the platinum wedding represented a life-changing fortune to 99 percent of the world’s population, yet I had assumed that my parents would gladly fork over whatever it took to give their baby a lavish wedding. I searched deep, trying to justify the lobster, the gown, the chateau, the whole glittering dream…and I couldn’t make myself do it.
    And that was exactly what my mom wanted.
    She’s a wily one, right?
    In hindsight, I can see that she wasn’t as concerned about the money as she was about my values. She didn’t like the idea that her child had grown into the sort of person who would spend money on a party instead of saving it for something that really mattered.
    And I have to give myself credit: If left to my own devices, I eventually would have come to my senses. Even if money were no object, my inner voice of reason would have hauled me back from the brink. I never would have been able to pull the trigger on ten-foot-tall, crystal-encrusted centerpieces, knowing that the money spent on them couldbe used for something much more lasting and meaningful in my life or the lives of those around me. (But let’s not kid ourselves, Dear Readers: I would have taken that Oscar de la Renta dress in a heartbeat. I said I was frugal, not crazy.)
    A couple of weeks later we sat down as a family, my levelheaded father and manfully brave fiancé with us, to discuss the wedding budget like sane people.
    The conversation was still unpleasant. It never feels good to ask