We’ve canceled our bachelorette parties.
But girls just wanna have fun. Here’s how we’re making it work.
I’m supposed to be in New Orleans right now. We’d started planning my best friend’s bachelorette-party weekend in October with a string of late-night conference calls and Google spreadsheets to find the perfect house to accommodate 15-plus women for four days. The house we chose fit all our wish lists: room enough that only one of us would have to sleep in a bathtub and equipped with a secondstory balcony for photos of our squad flanking our bride, Kayleigh, as we celebrated her happiness.
We’d planned gator boat tours, drag brunches and walking tours. We had detailed schedules and ideas for when to eat at the house and when to venture out. But mostly, we’d do what I always do at bachelorette parties — stay up late dancing and singing, giggling about our silliest memories while making new ones.
The goal was to make all the little stuff so well-orchestrated that we could focus on the big thing: my very best friend was finally marrying the boy she started dating half a lifetime ago, when he “won” a date with her at a high school auction. We were 17 then. And that was 17 years ago.
This is not the celebratory summer we’d planned.
When Kayleigh had to cancel her bachelorette party, she did so via email: “I have found leaning into gratitude is the best way to process everything,” she wrote. How lucky are we, she asked, that we have such an amazing group of friends and family that we’d ever even considered such a wild weekend in the first place?
In the time since Kayleigh sent that email, I have removed three bachelorette parties from my calendar — including, now, my own.
I’m a bachelorette-party pro. I’ve driven 665.8 miles with a plastic container filled with homemade, um … noveltyshaped … cookies delicately balanced on my passenger seat before an all-night icing session with co-conspiring bridesmaids. I’ve spotted Cyndi Lauper at a nearby table during dinner, and tipsily begged her to photobomb our 17-person squad as we all yelled “Girls just wanna have fun!” I’ve done the island excursion, the Vegas show, the New York night (and, yes, the weeks of blue-box macaroni-and-cheese dinners to bend my budget back into shape after). I have more photos of me in a black-dress, skinny-arm squat, flanking a bride in her $10 party veil than I have of my college graduation.
It is silly. And silly things are never supposed to break your heart. But in May, I was going to be the white dress in the middle of the photo — the girl in the veil. And then, like Kayleigh — and surely the thousands of other 2020 brides across the country — I had to cancel the one bachelorette party I wanted most: my moonshine-sipping Dollywood weekend in east Tennessee.
My friends are a tough group to gather. I spent most of my 20s moving around, settling into addresses in six different states. This means I’ve lived much of my adult life in chapters: I have four bridesmaids; each lives in a different state, spanning three time zones. Kayleigh, who is my maid of honor, and my friend Sarah, who had to nix her Austin bachelorette party, are in similar situations — we don’t get to see our favorite people often. These trips were going to be a once-in-alifetime chance to assemble the supergroups of our dreams.
But this is where I feel the ripples of gratitude come in — the little fringes of light that make me sigh and think of how lucky I am.
Last Friday, I was working at my home-office desk, which sits at a window facing my front porch. My fiancé, John, was supposed to be on his bachelor party in Louisville, Ky., but was just a room away when I saw one of his groomsmen drop a package on our doorstep, spot me and put a finger to his lips.
“Shh,” he mimed as he slipped away back to his car, before texting John to check the front door for a package.
Inside, carefully labeled, sat a flight of whiskey for John to taste the next day during a Zoom bachelor party his friends had set up for him. It was no Louisville, but it’s the closest they could get. And they took the time to give John the next-best thing. I smiled.
We’d done something similar for Sarah — mailing her $10 veils and dropping her favorite queso at her doorstep with bottles of wine before a Friday-night Zoom session on what would have been the first night of her bachelorette party. It wasn’t a slumber party. But it’s still a memory.
This Friday, on what would have been the second night of Kayleigh’s New Orleans adventure, we surprised her with a scavenger hunt. More than a dozen women mailed her more than 20 items, which one of our co-conspirators hid around Kayleigh’s house as we watched her hunt them down. It required a couple of weeks of planning, a few spreadsheets and a helpful friend who lives near Kayleigh’s house in California, as well as her all-star fiancé and the aid of my old rhyming dictionary from my high school cheerleading days.
But Kayleigh buzzed through her house chasing clues like the one I sent as a throwback to the days in college when we’d order takeout and be insulted by the delivery person’s estimation at the number of forks we needed:
“Remember those nights, in upstate New York;
When Alto Cinco food shamed us, delivering food with four forks?
We’d eat it for dinner, leftovers the next afternoon;
Find this inside joke between your knives and your spoons.”
This isn’t the summer we planned. And we don’t yet know if we’ll have to make more cancellations, including our weddings.
But we’re making memories. We have each other.
And for that, I’m grateful.