Bride Not Wanting to Be Around Her Mother

This sounds like less of a "wedding" issue and more of how well the bride gets along with her mom normally and how their boundaries are set up. Brides just wanna be happy, so if mom is annoying, over bearing, over opinionated, etc......then, ya, keep mom away!!!! LOL

You've been pondering this for over 10 years?
I wouldn't read anything into it without knowing all the details and little quirks between mother and daughter.
You don't know if the mom was being a control freak or if the bride was being a bridezilla - or maybe a bit of both.
Parent / child relationships can be complex and fraught with tons of baggage.
A wedding is a rite of passage - with a daughter stepping into an adult role and her mom having to acknowledge that - it's all new territory for everyone involved.

Frankly with weddings becoming such an industry - and when anything becomes 'an industry' the dollars spent starts rivaling the cost of running a small country - I'm surprised that more people are not eloping and saving the cash for a down payment on a house.

For your part - try hard not to read into these things.
It's nothing for your heart to be breaking over.
Unless you start to wonder why you are friends with such superficial people.
You might need to consider upping your standards for those you consider to be friends.

My wedding day was lovely and staying away from my mom never entered my mind.
So - no, I don't think that's normal.

The question should not be "is it normal for brides to not want to be around their mother?" It should be, "Does every mother-daughter pair have a good relationship?" The answer is "no."

Why is something from 10 years ago bothering you so much? Is it because your own daughters are getting older? Did you address this with your friend years ago to find out?

Some people are just unhappy. Maybe you didn't know your friend as much as you think you did. Or maybe she didn't share with you the dynamic in her family. Maybe the wedding (which you say was over the top) brought out the worst in everyone, and gave them just too much "together time" and your friend wanted this reception to be about her and her new husband, not her mother's need to fuss and bustle around.

I think there are 2 lessons here.

One is to nurture relationships with your daughters all the time, not just for the wedding day. You want to be in synch with your kids, as much as possible. That will help them through all kinds of events, from happy occasions to traumatic and stressful life happenings. That should be the goal. Everyone having to "fake it" through a big showy event and try to take care of and greet 300 guests puts a strain on everyone as well as the wallet. Perhaps that's what happened to your friend.

Two is to have better communication before a wedding about what each person expects from the it, and what would make it meaningful. Sometimes parents get so into the planning, they forget what it's about, and the married couple are doing things they don't want just because someone else is paying for it or pressuring them, or both.

My parents planned every stitch of my first wedding. If they'd been less involved, I'd have canceled it and not gone through with marrying someone I knew I wouldn't stay with for more than a few years. My 2nd wedding was done by me and my fiancé, and it was totally US. We loved it, and we've been married 34 years. My brother's first wedding was a nightmare because his wife's mother was mentally ill and had abused her daughter. The whole wedding was spent wondering if she was going to make good on her threat to stand up mid-ceremony and slap my mother. But no one had the courage to not invite her either. So yeah, that was one where "keep her away" was a safety issue as well as a social issue. I can assure you no one enjoyed that wedding either.

I think it's better for you to spend less time being sad about one day when you know so little about the background, and spend more time cementing your relationships with each daughter as well as their relationships with each other, so that everyone feels support but also has room to breathe and be themselves.

Every woman has a different relationship with their mother. Some of us have a great relationship. Others not so much. Don't try to understand it all just be grateful for your mom and raise your girls like your mom raised you.
Spend time keeping a good relationship with your girls and less time trying to figure out why some other bride didn't want mom bugging her on her wedding day

Lucky for you....you have a good relationship with your mother.
Maybe she doesn't. I have watched my mother and know exactly how NOT to behave with my daughter....especially as she gets older.
it breaks my heart too.

Not all mothers are mentally healthy. Mine was an alcoholic with a personality disorder or two thrown in. Family dynamics prevented any of us kids from knowing what was wrong with her. Unless you know a family very well it can be tricky putting all the pieces together. Having said that, healthy moms who are concerned about their daughters best interests and supporting them, most often have good relationships with them, but not always, of course. Personality differences can make getting along difficult and it can be worse at an emotionally saturated event like a wedding.

It breaks your heart and you don't understand because you do not have a mother like your friend's mother. Not all of us have nice mothers who treat us kindly. When you grow up with your mom walking all over you, being controlling, un-supportive, critical, and just an extremely narcissistic person it kills your heart more and more each year...till you end up putting up walls to protect yourself. It's healthy then to put up very strict boundaries and your friend was doing what is best for herself.

Your story is not necessarily about a bride who did not want to be around her mother on her wedding day.

You wrote: "As we entered the reception site...she said 'Just keep my mother away from me'." She was already done with most of the wedding at that point, she just wanted some breathing room at the reception! She probably wanted to drink champagne and dance with her friends and shake off some of the stress from the past few weeks/months of planning. I would have heard it as a lighthearted joke and not thought twice about it (and I do not think you need to be worrying about it ten years later).

what i think is weird is going back to a ten year old situation and extrapolating 'normal' from it.

while, no, it's probably not the norm for brides to avoid their moms, there are also as many reasons that a bride might want to as there are people. relationships are complicated.

even a bride who adores her mother might, for a myriad of complex causes, need to distance herself on a day of enormous stress and emotion.

why do two unrelated situations create a scenario that 'breaks your heart' and causes you to try and apply such a broad brush?

weddings are weird beasts, and adrenaline runs rampant. don't read too much into it.

khairete
S.

Is it normal for brides to not want to be around their mothers on wedding days ...

Kind of an odd question.

It would depend on how close they are.

It feels like you're taking a survey (no offense).

I can't imagine being concerned about this - about other people. I don't know. My friends all wanted their mothers there.

I can understand why this bride would make this request for many reasons.

It is telling that she didn’t care about the ramifications of inviting 50 more people. It’s obvious that her parents were paying for it with her father saying the wedding was getting out of hand.

I wonder if her parents were trying to rein this in and your friend was punishing her mother for it.

I can only speculate. You know the bride - what do you think was happening?

Did you ever figure out why she didn't want to be around her mother? I was given the task to keep the bride's mother out of the room at my friend's wedding
because her mother didn't approve of the marriage and threatened to go to the wedding to stop it. She didn't come. Yes it was sad. My friend and her mother had a good relationship later. Do you know if daughter and mother were able to begin a more positive relationship later?

Why would you think your daughters would cut you out of their weddings? You and your daughters are different than your friend. Continue to have a positive relationship with them. Let go of your friend's experience. I suggest that holding on to your memory could make it more difficult for you to have a good experience with your daughters' weddings. Stop comparing you and your daughters to your experience 10 years ago.

I suggest that there was a reason the bride made this choice. For here she was happier by not seeing her mother. You would be sad if your girls cut you out. Perhaps the bride made a reasonable decision based on her experience with her mother. It may have been that the mother chose to stay apart from her daughter. Without having more information about your friend and her mother, I would've been helpful at the time. I would not have strong feelings about it 10 years later.

I don't know, I didn't have that issue, but I do know some mothers can be overbearing and controlling, as well as very anxious and prone to stress, all of which could rub off on the bride and make her feel miserable and more stressed on her wedding day. My best friend, a guy, has an overbearing mother and he is always hoping she won't accompany him to his medical treatments, as she has gotten into arguments with the nurses and doctors. Whenever he goes alone, they will seem more relaxed around him and ask about the "difficult" woman. He knows how she is, and if he pushes back, she pushes even more, so he has given up. I would HATE to have her as a mother, or even a mother-in-law, and would understand if he said he didn't want her around at a special event like that, especially if she disapproved of the choice of bride (which she would, because every man or woman who enters his life, even for friendship, is just not good enough for her little prince). Maybe the mother is verbally abusive toward her daughter when a little drunk, maybe she is a narcissist who must be in every picture, maybe she is clingy and follows her daughter around like a little dog, or is the kind to constantly fix every tendril of loose hair, bra straps, etc., in an awkward, obnoxious matter...again, lots of speculation as to a cause, but no way of knowing the true reason here.