One month from the big day!

Hitting the shops for my bridesmaid's gifts.

Picture this. You're five and a half weeks out from your wedding and your stress levels are already running rampant, wreaking havoc on your skin and rendering you the type of bride you thought you'd never be. Your fiance is scared of you, your best friend thinks you're a diva and your photographer wants to kill you because your 10,000 commitments means you can't settle on a date for the pre-wedding consultation. Your bank account has $243 in it, your dress feels heavy at one of your final fittings and you swear it's a lot pooofier than you wanted it to be, and the veil you revolved the whole dress around suddenly doesn't look right with the lace you chose when you were having one of your indecisive moments. The kinds of indecisive moments you usually have at sumo salad or muffin break, but quadrupled in magnitude.

And then your band cancels on you. And people start telling you that the new owners of the reception centre aren't up to scratch where their meals are concerned, and that there probably won't be enough food on the big day, which is equivalent to the anti-christ's coming to earth where Lebanese weddings are concerned. Suddenly, it feels like the whole world is crumbling around you, and you start talking to yourself in the third person (in public, which is something you promised yourself you would never do).

So what do you do? Let me tell you, because this week, I am that bride. And, because I just don't think that James will love me the same if I am bald, I refuse to tear my hair out and screech profanities at passers-by when I get the dreaded band phone call in the middle of Sydney city. Instead, I delegate. I tell the wedding planner to discuss the menu options (and quantities) yet again with the reception centre – after all, it's not like I can change the venue when the RSVP cards are pouring in like the rains of this Sydney spring. I have my mother back her up, implying once again the magnitude of the food situation. And, because I tell myself it would be mean to use my journalistic powers to black-list my band, I have my MC find an alternative.

And because I refuse to deal with the rest of it, I take the afternoon off and treat myself to the Now to Wow treatment at Benefit cosmetics at Paddington (because good brows fix everything) and a decent shopping spree. I buy shoes for my laylia (pre-wedding party) even though they're ridiculously overpriced for their style, a pair of sandals because they're pink (and encrusted with pearls), and then I hit the shops shopping for my bridesmaid gifts. The loot they will end up scoring after serving me well on my big day? The kind of stuff I'd buy to treat myself (and hence something that will remind them of our fun times afterward): a lovely pair of earrings from Forever New which they'll wear on the big day ($18), a pretty floral tea cup from T2 ($22) and a MOR scented candle whose amazing fragrance will be wafting through the air long after they bid me farewell for my honeymoon.

You see, every bride is going to go through a crisis or other in the big day. The crux of a situation is what you make of it, which is where retail therapy fixes everything for the morphing bridezilla. Well, except for the balance of her bank account.