Dr. Fiancé returned last night from a four-day bachelor party in Costa Rica, courtesy his brother and three best friends. He brought me back a present, warning as he handed it over that there weren’t a lot of good gift options in Costa Rica—by which I assume he means at the airport—but he proved himself to be totally wrong by bringing me the world’s most adorable stuffed monkey with a baby monkey Velcro-wrapped around its torso. “I saw it and thought mama monkey and baby monkey—she’s got to have that,” he explained as I cried—yes, cried—at the sheer adorableness of it all—including the fact that I have a fiancé who brings home stuffed animals from his bachelor party.
It used to be that when Dr. Fiancé went out of town, I’d get sad and lonely and kind of pissed off at him for leaving me alone in this big house in a fancy neighborhood that is decidedly not a historic school building filled with friendly artists eager to come over for a cup of tea and a chat about the best way to decoupage an old map of onto an old desk salvaged from the curb. Plus, we don’t have curtains on any of the windows, so cranking the stereo to 11 and dancing around the living room in my underwear isn’t really an option, and what else is there for a girl to do when her fiancé dashes off to, say, Costa Rica with his boyfriends for the weekend?
But this time around, I didn’t get sad or lonely or angry—I just got kind of cranky. I’m not sure exactly what I was cranky about, but for once it didn’t feel like I was cranky at Dr. Fiancé, more like I was cranky the way someone is when they have a million things to do (plan a wedding, prepare house for baby, write a book) and are too nauseous and exhausted to get many of them done in any kind of efficient way. Plus there are these pregnancy hormones to blame.
Truth be told, it’s not the book or the baby that are the issue. I want the wedding to be planned for me. I guess this isn’t a new feeling so much as a return visitor—the kind that eats all the cookies and overstays their welcome.
Once again, as much as I want to be married to Dr. Fiancé, I do not want to interview more photographers who will tell me that their $2000 base rate doesn’t include a single actual physical photograph—just their time. I do not want to spend even one more minute shopping for a maternity bridal gown, a maternity rehearsal dinner outfit, or a suitable maternity day-after-the-wedding outfit. I’m not interested in finding a tailor, a seamstress, or someone who knows how to make corsages, and I’m done with all the meetings and emails with the woman struggling to make our invitations look the way she swore they would when I forked over a deposit. I do not want to drive to Mount Rainier to taste potatoes and salmon and make sure they’re up to scratch—in part because if they’re not, I do not want to find another caterer. Ignorance is bliss, baby, and salmon is salmon.
I keep telling myself the reason I’m not making wedding progress is that surfing the internet exacerbates my morning sickness—which is totally true but didn’t stop me from registering for fifty-some-odd baby items at Target yesterday morning. It’s so much more compelling to do stuff for the baby who will be part of our lives forever than for the wedding, which will be one weekend, so I started trying to think of wedding planning as “marriage planning” instead to see if that helps.
Unfortunately I quickly realized that it’s not like the caterer, photographer, and cake maker are going to be with us for our entire marriage—if only—so it really is planning for a wedding.
I’ve returned to wanting to elope or squeeze into my Goodwill wedding dress and traipse down to the courthouse on Friday afternoon and spend the weekend honeymooning downtown at the W Hotel. Surely everyone who’s already purchased a plane ticket will understand. They’d still be welcome to visit us in July—they’d even be allowed to bring us gifts—especially if they’re completely adorable.
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