Every girl wants her big day to be HER big day.
When she walks down the aisle, she wants heads to turn and mouths to drop open whispering ‘isn’t she beautiful!’, not ‘Isn’t she beautiful… no not the bride, her Mum Nicole!’
When Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise’s daughter Isabella got married on the weekend, according to the Daily Mail, her A-Lister Mum and Dad were noticeably absent from the guest list.
Wow, that’s almost Shakespearean.
It would certainly cause a tragedy in my family – probably my own. My mum would kill me. Is there no greater harm to womankind than for a mother not to be invited to her own daughter’s wedding? It’s not like a 21st when you want to party hard so you get your family in and out early so you can start knocking back vodka shots with your mates ’til dawn.
Inside Isabella Cruise’s Scientology wedding that mom Nicole Kidman was banned from attending http://t.co/RNZKjNdFqU pic.twitter.com/WoR2srKFuM
— Daily Mail Femail (@Femail) October 6, 2015
This is a wedding.
Your parents are supposed to sit in the front pew on the ‘bride’s side’ of the church. Sadly. Isabella’s front pew was probably empty, as is Tom and Nicole’s marital nest.
Poor Nicole! Once she knew her big girl was tying the knot, she would have had the Mother of the Bride apricot twinset with pearl necklace ready to go. The orchid corsage is probably still sitting in the fridge, never to be pinned to the breast of that loving mother. (Perhaps instead she’ll plunge it through the her daughter’s disloyal heart!)
There are rumours afoot that this super snub is the result of a longstanding animosity between the two. I mean if you want to up the ante, then not inviting to your wedding wedding is passive aggressive gold.
You can’t blame Isabella, who wants Dorian Gray for a Mum? Or some couch leaping top gun for a dad? You want Ralph and Maureen, two chubby devoted middle agers who have really let themselves go.
The rule is, you should always be hotter than your Mum. Especially on your wedding day. You don’t want the groom going all ‘coo coo ca choo Mrs Robinson’ on you before you’ve even got the ring on your finger.
When you have famous people in your family, it makes normal things weird. Because although everyone ‘pretends’ they are cool with it, no one is. Famous people pull all the attention, which makes them problematic guests at someone else’s event.
I know this all too well.
I invited my daughter’s Uncle and his partner to her christening, which was a hippy styled circle gathering on a beach. That uncle’s name was Michael Hutchence and his partner was Paula Yates. I was relatively new to the family and naive to the ways of mega celebrity and had no idea what kind of chaos I had invoked with my ‘everyone wear white and bring a wish’ to the outdoor naming ceremony.
It’s beautiful to be in nature, but somehow the ambience of the day was ruined by the 20 photographers standing behind rocks, in the bushes, and some just metres away on the sand.
To Michael and Paula’s credit, they never once complained that I had set up a publicity storm that would have them photographed in what looked like some sort of white wearing pagan cult where they seemed to be sacrificing a baby.
Days later our intimate gathering of family and friends was in magazines around the world. It was surreal. My daughter’s naming ceremony became about Michael and Paula. Even when they tried to be ‘part of the crowd’ they couldn’t.
The machine of celebrity takes that away from a person, you can never again be a regular Joe.
Tom and Nicole may be super rich, super celebrities. But they can’t attend their own daughter’s wedding without wrecking it. All that money, all that privilege, all that power, and yet you can no longer quietly connect with the people you love. If that’s not a curse, then I don’t know what is.
Thank God I’m ordinary.
At least I know if one of my four daughter’s doesn’t invite me to her wedding, it’s not because I’ll ruin it, its because she hates me.
Her daughter just got married. Time flies. Click through for a gallery of Nic over the years…
