Mother of the bride speech examples

Esme was six years old, standing at the kitchen window, giving a running commentary on our neighbour's gardening to nobody. She had been doing it for about twenty minutes. When I asked who she was talking to she said, without turning round, "he doesn't know he's doing it well."

I'm Kate, Esme's mum. I'll be quick, because she has asked me to be and because she is still the only person who can make me do as I'm told.

That thing she did at the window is the thing she still does. Esme notices when people are doing something well and she says so, out loud, to their face, at a volume that has embarrassed all of us in restaurants. She told a bus driver he had a lovely voice. She told her own dentist he had improved.

I used to worry that the world would knock it out of her. It has not. She is thirty-two and she still tells people, and I have watched grown adults not know where to look and then walk away about an inch taller.

What I did not expect was how much I would learn from it. I am not a person who says things out loud. I have got better in the last ten years, and it is because of my daughter, not the other way round.

Tomas. You told her, in front of me, on the second time I ever met you, that she was the bravest person you knew. You just said it. At a table. Over a Sunday lunch. I watched her go completely pink, and I thought: right, he does it too.

Esme, my love. You have spent your entire life telling people what is good about them. I hope this marriage tells you back, every day.

Please raise your glasses. To Esme and Tomas.

Between the ages of four and about seven, Isla would only leave the house wearing a hat. Any hat. It did not need to suit the weather, the outfit or the occasion. There was a summer where it was a woolly hat with a bobble and there was nothing any of us could do about it.

I'm Fiona, Isla's mother, and I have a photograph of her at a beach in August in that hat, and it is going round later.

Here is what I did not understand at the time. Isla was not being difficult. Isla had decided that this was a thing that was true about her, and she was not going to be talked out of a thing that was true about her by weather.

She has never once been talked out of anything since. Not by me, not by teachers, not by two extremely persuasive employers. She left a very good job to do a much harder one for less money because she believed in it, and she was twenty-eight and she did not ask anybody's advice, and she was completely right.

I have found this exhausting and I would not change a single day of it.

The thing that surprised me was watching it from the other side. Because a person who cannot be talked out of things is also a person who does not give up on people. Isla has friends in this room she has known for twenty years, some of whom she has had to be extremely patient with, and none of whom she has ever let go.

Ravi. I want to say this properly, and I want your mum and dad to hear it. You did not try to make her more reasonable. You just agreed with her about the hat. Whatever the hat happened to be that week. And she has been so completely herself these last five years.

Isla, you have been exactly who you are since you were four. Do not let anyone talk you out of it.

To Isla and Ravi.

Ada learned to read at four and immediately began reading things out loud to people who had not asked. Signs. Menus. Other people's letters, once, which we dealt with at the time.

I'm Marguerite, Ada's mum. Two minutes, I promise.

The reading never stopped and it turned into something else. Ada is the person in every group who has actually read the thing. Not skimmed it — read it. She reads the terms and conditions. She read the entire lease of a flat she was not renting because a friend was and the friend was worried.

It is not diligence, exactly. It is that Ada does not think anybody should have to face something on their own without knowing what is in it.

Theo, you are marrying someone who is going to read everything before you have to, and who is going to tell you what is in it, kindly, whatever it says. I hope you understand what you are getting. I do not think I did, for about the first twenty years.

Ada, my darling girl. You have read the world so carefully your entire life. Please, occasionally, let somebody read it to you.

Everyone — to Ada and Theo.