I Have a Semi-Dilemma

I mean, it's not really a dilemma as much as just something different that what I thought. See, I asked my mom some number of years ago if they had a wedding account for me & my mom told me it wasn't much, about $10,000. So when the time actually came for my wedding, I brought it up again. Knowing that they have 2 kids in college, I wasn't sure if they'd still be willing to pay for the wedding. She said yes, but certainly no more than the $10,000 she had told me about. Ok, I thought, no problem, I can work with that. I should mention that we're broke. Not what a lot of people consider broke, but REALLY, REALLY broke. And we have bad credit. Good times.

Anywhoo, I'm talking to my mom about the wedding a few weeks ago & she mentions something along the lines of not spending it all on the wedding & saving some. I say well, it's not really our money. I mean, it's their money so if we don't spend it all, it's not like we get to keep it. At this point she says well, maybe you should think about it because it doesn't matter to me. $10,000 is $10,000 either way. Now I take this to mean that regardless of what we do with it, it's our money, right?

Apparently not. I called her today to talk about how she wanted to handle the money. I assumed she wouldn't want me to call he about every little thing I wanted to spend money on. After all, in my head, I had the money to do with as I pleased which meant I was planning to buy some make up & jewelry, get my hair done for the wedding, as well as take a pilates class & buy an excersise video. Ya know, the stuff you do to look more fabulous than normal, not to mention the boy still needs a ring. So I allude to this in the conversation & she starts asking me why I need make up & don't I already have jewelry & was she supposed to pay for all that personal stuff. Hhmmm, this isn't going like I thought it would. I explain to her what I was thinking & clearly, this is not what she was thinking. Said she needed to talk to my step dad about it. I reminded her about that "$10,000 is $10,000" conversation & she says yeah well, that's when she thought I couldn't do it for under 10K. She also said it was before my dad sent me $2000 (which we were planning to use for the honeymoon).

Now, let me be clear here. I am VERY grateful that my parents are even willing to pay for the wedding so I don't want to come off like some petulant bitchy bridezilla. Before the 10K is 10K conversation, in no way did I expect my mom to just hand me the money to do with what I wanted. However, after that conversation, I kinda did (within reason, of course) so that's the way I had been planning. Now it appears as if that will change. Whatever, I can do it, it'll just be hard - real hard (which goes against my whole cheap & easy thing). After all, I'm currently unemployed & don't have any way to put aside my own money right now and the boys work has been slow as well. So I'm not sure how this will work but surely, I'll figure something out, right?

Right & don't call me Shirley.