Mother of the Bride Speech Examples: 3 Full Speeches with a Balanced Tone

Robin asked me to keep this short and to not cry until the toast. I drove a school bus for twenty-six years, so I can do a tight schedule. The crying I make no promises on.

I'm Dawn, Robin's mum. For most of her childhood I had forty other people's children on my bus every morning before I'd had my own coffee, which is its own kind of training. And from about the age of eight, Robin ran what she called the negotiations desk. It was a folding card table on our driveway. If two kids on our street had fallen out, you brought it to Robin. She'd sit you both down, hear it out, and hand down a ruling. There was a fee. Two dollars, payable by the guilty party, which she determined.

I thought it was a phase. The summer she was ten, the Petersons two doors down were getting divorced, loudly, with the windows open, and I came home to find both of them sitting at that card table while my daughter explained to them where they had each gone wrong. They listened. I want that on the record. Two grown adults took marriage advice from a child charging two dollars, and honestly, they stayed friends, which is more than most.

That has been Robin her whole life. She walks toward the argument everyone else is backing away from. She cannot stand to leave two people stuck on opposite sides of a thing. Other kids wanted to win. Robin wanted everybody to shake hands and go home.

So when she told me she'd met Andre, my first thought, as her mother, was not is he kind or is he funny. It was, oh no, the poor man is going to get fixed.

Because that's the trap with my daughter. She loves you by sorting you out. And most people let her, because it's easier, and then a little piece of them quietly resents it. I watched it happen for years and I never knew how to warn her.

Andre didn't need warning. The first time I saw them together properly was a bad week. My husband was in the hospital, nothing dramatic in the end, but for three days we didn't know that. Robin went into full negotiations mode. The doctors, the parking, my sister who flew in and made everything worse. And Andre, this big quiet man I'd met twice, did not try to help me. He went and stood next to Robin at the vending machine and said, hey, you don't have to run this one, I've got the small stuff. And she let him. My daughter, who has organised this entire family since she was eight, put her head on his shoulder and let somebody else carry the small stuff.

That was the moment. Not a grand one. A vending machine in a hospital hallway at eleven at night.

Andre, here's what you're getting. A woman who will fix everything you didn't ask her to fix, and who has finally, in you, met the one person she's willing to be looked after by. Don't let her talk you out of that job.

Robin, my love. Your whole childhood I worried that table would leave you carrying everyone. And then you went and found the one man on earth who pulls up a chair and carries it back. I am so proud of the woman behind that desk I can barely get this sentence out.

Everyone, on your feet, glasses up. To Robin and Andre. Whatever comes, may you always have someone who takes the small stuff. And Andre, for the record, the ruling on you came back kind. No fee.

Katie gave me strict instructions tonight. Keep it under five minutes and do not, under any circumstances, mention the ledger. So. Let me tell you about the ledger.

I'm Bernadette. I've run a chip van down on the harbour for twenty-nine years, and Katie is my middle one, which means she was raised in a queue. Some kids grow up in a house. Mine grew up between the vinegar and the wasps.

From about nine years old, Katie kept a notebook. She called it her favours book. If somebody did her a good turn, in it went, with the date. If she did somebody a good turn, that went in too. She was keeping the books on kindness before she could do long division. I found it once and assumed she was after collecting on people. I had her completely wrong. She wasn't tracking who owed her. She was tracking who she still owed.

And she paid up. Old Mr Ferraby used to come to the van every Friday, on his own since his wife passed, and one Friday he didn't. Katie was eleven. She walked a portion of haddock and chips up that hill to his house herself, knocked on, and sat with him while he ate it. Then she put it in the book. Not as a good deed. As a debt cleared, because he'd given her a fifty pence tip every Friday for two years and in her accounting that meant she owed him a visit.

That's been Katie ever since. She remembers who's gone quiet. She notices the regular who stops being regular. The whole town thinks she's just friendly, and she is, but underneath the friendly there's a girl keeping careful accounts of every person who was ever good to her, determined that none of it goes unpaid.

Which worried me, if I'm honest, because a girl like that gives and gives and you fret about who's putting anything back in her column.

Then along came Sunil. He turned up at the van as a customer, like they all do, and made the rookie error of asking Katie what she'd recommend. Forty minutes that queue waited. I nearly charged him rent.

But here's when I knew. Two winters back I had my hip done, and the van had to stay shut, which for me is the same as the world ending. Sunil had known our Katie all of five months. He turned up at six in the morning, in the dark, in February, and asked me to teach him to run the fryer. He was hopeless. He battered his own thumb. But he opened that van every morning I was laid up, badly, while Katie was at work, so that Mr Ferraby and the rest of them never went a single Friday without. He never told Katie he was doing it. I had to.

And I thought, there it is. Someone's finally writing in her column.

Katie, love. All these years I watched you keep everyone else's favours paid and I lay awake wondering who'd ever keep yours. Look down the front row. That daft lad burned his thumb on a fryer at six in the morning for people he'd never met, just because they mattered to you. That's the entry I've been waiting your whole life to see in that book.

Sunil, welcome to the family. The van is cold, the hours are unsociable, and you'll never get the smell of fish out of a good coat. We're thrilled to have you.

Right, everybody up on your feet, get a glass in your hand, even if it's only the cheap stuff. To Katie and Sunil. May your favours always come back to you. And son, your first Friday is on the house. After that, you're in the book.

Pip made me swear two things tonight. Keep it short, and don't bring up the magpie. One of those was never going to happen.

I'm Glennys, Pip's mum. I cooked in the shearing sheds out our way for the best part of twenty years before the flowers, so I've fed a lot of hungry men who didn't say thank you, which prepares you for raising teenagers. Pip's the youngest of three and the only one who ever brought things home.

She was seven when she found the magpie. Half feathered, fallen out of a gum, and the wise heads all said leave it, nature's nature, it won't last the night. Pip looked at every one of those people like they'd suggested something criminal. She named him Keith. She fed Keith mince off a teaspoon for six weeks in a shoebox by the stove, and Keith not only lived, Keith stayed. For nine years that bird ruled our yard. He'd sit on the line and supervise. And every spring, without fail, he swooped the same postman, a lovely fella called Trevor, who eventually started delivering our mail wearing a bucket on his head. We lost two posties. Trevor stuck it out. I think he admired the commitment.

That's been Pip from the start. She takes in the thing everyone else has written off, and she does not let go. Not ever. The rest of the world sees a lost cause. My daughter sees something that just hasn't been stood up for yet. She brought home injured galahs, a foreign exchange student who cried for a fortnight, and one boy in year nine the whole school had given up on. She fed the lot of them, more or less, off a teaspoon.

So when she rang to say she'd met Dan, my worry wasn't whether he was good enough. It was whether he understood that he was marrying a woman who will always choose the lost cause over the easy afternoon. Some fellas can't live alongside that. It asks a lot of a person.

Dan can. And I worked it out at their own engagement party, watching him, not her. We've an old uncle, Pip's great uncle Mervyn, eighty-six and deaf as a post, who comes to every do and gets parked in a corner because nobody can be bothered with the shouting. It's the kind of thing Pip clocks the second she walks in. She was across the room, pinned by Dan's mother, and I saw her glance over at Mervyn, working out how to get to him. She didn't have to. Dan was already there. He'd dragged a chair up close, he had the old man's good ear, and the pair of them spent an hour going through Mervyn's war about a dispute over a boundary fence in 1971. Dan does not care about fences. He sat there like it was the only story being told that day.

Nobody had asked him to. Pip hadn't even seen him do it. That's when I knew. The thing I'd hoped someone would one day be for my daughter, he just is, without needing the credit.

Pip, my darling. Your whole life I've watched you cross a room to whoever the rest of it had written off, and I used to lie awake hoping you'd find a man who'd cross it first. He's sitting right there, and at your own party, he beat you to it.

Dan, as far as this family is concerned you were one of ours from the moment you pulled that chair up to Mervyn. Out here, that's the whole ceremony. The ones who go and sit with the person in the corner belong.

Everybody, up you get and charge your glasses. To Pip and Dan. May you always have something worth saving and the heart to save it. And Dan, watch the magpies in spring. The commitment runs in the family.