I'm really at a loss here. We were supposed to have our wedding reception on May 23, 2020. We already paid deposits on everything since the wedding was less than 2 months out when everything shut down. We didn't get to have the bridal shower, or bachelor/ette parties. We thankfully still got married but because it was so early on in Covid, we did not have ANY kind of reception or dinner or anything, even with our parents. That was so early in Covid that if our wedding had been a week earlier the church would not have allowed us to have the 10 people we had attend. We postponed to Nov 21, 2020. Since everything was still closed, we had to postpone again, and in early 2021 before the vaccine was widely available and things were still mostly closed, we didn't think we'd be able to have it in 2021, and picked May 27, 2022. At that point, my husband had been told that everyone going on deployment in 2022 had already been notified. Well, SURPRISE, they didn't have enough people in another unit so he got pulled into the deployment last minute and will be gone for at least a year. This means I am going to have to try to work it out with my vendors to postpone yet again, and we can't choose a date until he returns since I won't know when that is until it happens. So we're looking at potentially mid-late 2023 to even 2024 before we can have this wedding because we'll have to find a date that the venue and all our vendors can accommodate, or lose thousands.
I am so done. I know this is a first world problem, but I can't help but get upset every time I have to think about this wedding, and jealous that others are getting to have theirs. We started planning in 2018, so there are vendors that have been holding our payments for three years, and will be for up to five or even six by the time we get the services we paid for. People in my own family are making me feel like we don't deserve to be celebrated, that basically we missed our chance so we shouldn't expect people to treat it like a normal wedding by then. We'd been holding off on trying to start our family, and I don't want to wait even longer to start in case there are issues, but I didn't really want to be pregnant or have a newborn by the time we can hold the wedding or go on a honeymoon (we were supposed to go next month but the last-minute deployment ruined that too).
I'm not really sure what I'm looking for here. I guess any advice on how I can get through this year and plan a reception as quickly as I can once he's back, and how to maybe differentiate the event enough so people will still actually want to celebrate us and not just think we're being selfish or stupid for still wanting to do all the wedding traditions we missed, even though we will have been married for 3 or 4 years at that point?