Okay, I admit it, I’ve been thinking a bit about marriage, weddings and babies. I’m rapidly closing in on 33 and I am, for the first time ever, living with my boyfriend. We’re also raising three lovely cats together.
In the last ten years, I’ve learned what it is to experience loving relationships, fall madly and incontrovertibly in love, have my heart broken, and to recover from the agony of heartbreak. I’ve watched the majority of my friends go through engagements, weddings, have children (not necessarily in that order) and, in a couple of instances, go through devastating break-ups and divorces. I’ve been a bridesmaid thrice, maid-of-honour once and once an usher. I’ve worn awful dresses and fantastic dresses. I have done the bridal make-up for friends, their wedding invitations, and taken countless photographs. I have spent money I did not have, and have had others make up the difference when I absolutely could not spend any more money. I have attended stag-and-does, jack-and-jills, a wedding social in Winnipeg, showers, bachelorettes, and engagement parties. I have made ribbon-hats at showers, made nice with judgemental old women and volunteered to help tear-down reception set-ups when the people who were meant to do it simply effed off after the dancing was done. I have attended big weddings, small weddings, lake-side weddings, masquerade weddings, weddings hosted in the parents’ home, church and synagogue weddings and weddings in parks. I have done the Chicken Dance until I could not breathe and steadfastly refused to ever “do the Macarena.”
I’ve thought a lot about weddings, although usually not my own. I have been that girl who stepped sideways in order to avoid catching the bouquet. Even when I was in long-term relationships, marriage was a level of commitment that I never wanted to think about. When Rick gave me a diamond solitaire for our one-year anniversary, I had to stop wearing it on my finger because people kept asking if I were engaged. I put it on my necklace with my unicorn and Star of David charms, which was about as meaningful a place as I could think to put it, and where it could never be confused for an engagement ring. I loved Rick, but never wanted to marry him. Heck, I didn’t even want to live with him. I knew I wasn’t ready to share my life and space in that way, as much as I knew six months into my relationship with Glenn that I did. And I thought all that time that maybe I just had a problem with commitment. No, not true. Had it been possible, I’d have shared everything with Gareth, but with Glenn, something was different. There was a calculated, thinking process behind my increasing level of trust and commitment. He’s good for me and I’m good for him. We get on well. We love each other. We are doing a good job parenting our cats. There is a future there not complicated by distance or fear or whatever else gets in the way of two people being together. Really together.
Friends are irritated when I shrug off their questions about marriage. “Do you think you’ll get married?” “Are you gonna marry him?” I roll my eyes when they make not-so-innocent comments about how cute our kids would be. Ya, they’d probably be adorable, but nerdy and have terrible vision. And I know we’d probably make pretty great parents. Glenn wants kids. He wants to be a stay-at-home dad. I want to be the career-oriented mom, so that’s just about perfect. Glenn’s going to have to learn how to make more than pasta and scrambled eggs, though. The truth is I’m not being coy. I’m not that girl who’s had every detail of her imaginary wedding planned since she was twelve. At twelve, I thought anyone who married before the age of 28 was doing it much too young, never mind babies. I assumed I’d get married and have at least one kid, but I expected to end up a single parent. My mother was (and still is) an incredible roll-model for me and she did an amazing job raising me on her own. I think 75% of kids in two-parent families would be lucky to have half the love and support that I did. Truly, her parenting has been a gift. If I could be half the parent she is, I believe my child(ren) would turn out great. But that doesn’t mean I’m planning on being a parent this instant. Please, I hold my breath before my period starts every month. I read The Saddle Club as a girl, not The Babysitters Club. I’m still that girl, despite my womanly curves and increasingly loud biological clock.
My ambivalence toward marriage has many roots. Sadly, one lesson I learned quite early in life is that even when two people love each other utterly, things can still not work out. Addiction destroyed my parents’ marriage and all the love in the world couldn’t save it, not when one person (my papa) didn’t want to give up his other great love: heroin. I understand that even when everything is perfect, things can still go horribly wrong. Maybe being the child of a single mother in a neighbourhood made of nuclear families made me more sensitive to the fact that these textbook terrific marriages were anything but. Too many of my friends grew up and realised in their teens and twenties that their parents had nothing holding them together but their parenting responsibilities and worse yet, had long ago stopped respecting each other. Marriage is supposed to be “until death do us part”, right? Is that what keeps people together when the can barely face each other at the breakfast table? I don’t want that. I have a very pragmatic approach to marriage: it’s a legal bond that should be the firm foundation on which to build a family. I’m a hair away from not believing it’s necessary at all. I have plenty of friends who have never married their obvious life-partner, and are often doing a great job raising kids. Marriage isn’t necessary. And then, at the same time, I’m still a bit of a traditionalist and a romantic at heart (although I often keep the latter well hidden) who thinks that if you are committed enough to have children together, you should get married and make it “official”, even if it’s at City Hall or an elopement in Turkestan.
And yet, here I am, thinking about all this big stuff. I have managed to come up with a list of things I would certainly not want if I get married. I wouldn’t want a big wedding. I wouldn’t want it to be expensive. I don’t want gifts, just the money thanks. I don’t think a sit-down meal is necessary. Honestly, I don’t even think a wedding is necessary. I do love a good party, though. And I’d want my favourite people to be present. If I were to walk down the aisle, I’d only have one maid-of-honour and she could pick her own damn dress. I want some very basic elements of a Jewish wedding. I don’t need a Chuppah, but I want the circling. I need a glass to be broken. I want my mom to yell “Mazel Tov !” and clutch her hands together in joy. I want to go away somewhere, but I’d want to go somewhere that counts, and the expense that can be saved by not having a big (or any) wedding could be spent on honeymooning. Tuscany. Japan. Dinosaur Provincial Park. Scotland or Iceland, or some place remote and windswept. My needs are pretty simple, even if I’m not particularly sure of what I want. See? I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about it in the same non-specific way I’ve been contemplating my PhD. I want it, I just haven’t quite figured out what my research direction will be.
Next entry? Maybe I’ll talk about that PhD.
