The Art of Compromise

I bend like grass in the wind...everyone elses feelings ahead of mine, everyone elses needs come first. I should be studied by anthropologists due to my remarkable lack of spine.

And I just put my foot down dammit!

I am sick and fricking tired of people taking my aura of compromise and "let's just get along"-ness as weakness or indifference. And if there is one thing I've learnt from my lack of vertebrae, that is people will take advantage of someone's desire not to rock the boat.

My beloved Mother for example (drip THAT with sarcasm, and you are right where I am right now). She is unable of giving an opinion without making you feel as if you are absolutely stupid to do it any other way than the way she has suggested. This all came up over Bridesmaid Dress colours, which I couldn't give a flying frig about. Bridesmaids colours, whee. So what? So, I eventually whittled my own intense disinterest into two choices; champagne and charcoal. Upon finding out that, oops, champagne makes my girls look like extras in "Dawn of the Dead". I change and go for the charcoal. Fine. Or so I thought.

Twenty eight years of brutal and intense bootcamp training in the art of avoiding my mother's opinion should have kicked in about now, but no, I decide she deserves...not a "say", but at least a moment to air her thoughts. And air she did.

She simply cannot tell me (as any rational person would in the face of an eager, sunny bride-to-be asking an opinion) that she isn't fond of the colour. She can't even make non-committal noises. No, my mother has to have an all-out "your choices suck" kind of moment. The kind of moment, where, I paraphrase, she called my choice "dull, dire, funerial, boring, and sad".

Oh, ok then.

Bearing in mind that I have been completely non-plussed by the events leading up to our wedding. My "choices" have been flexible and frankly, the result of many coin tosses. But this one was my own choice. My only choice. So, what does my rational thought process do as soon as I hear the tired from Mummy-Dearest?

I want to change it to champagne.

"Frick that" is what (I believe) I heard a small portion of spinal column whisper up to my grey matter. I couldn't believe that I was actually going to change MY choice, at MY wedding, which I AM PAYING FOR because my mother doesn't fancy the colour.

Screw you Mum...I'm getting charcoal.

So while I rest my body with it's burgeoning spine, I will be informing my BM's to go order their dresses in that dire, funerial colour.

Then I will proceed to hide under my duvet and avoid the incoming calls from England.

Ah, compromise!