"If we throw an engagement party at the flat, people will feel obliged to buy us presents..."
Also, some fool gave her a pile of wedding magazines - these have driven the poor woman insane and filled her head with all sorts of ideas for stuff that we didn't care about before. Because of this, I now have to come up with an idea for imaginative party favours for the guests - as if giving them a free feed and open bar for the night wasn't enough.
The Girl is an evil genius
Weddings are easy
Brilliant. 48 hours after we got home and the wedding is almost entirely organised. It helps that there’s only one set of parents to please – mine won’t even hear about it until it’s all over – so all I had to do was agree on a date and make a list of my guests, the girl and her mum have already taken care of everything else.
End of November at her daddy’s private club in Belgravia, black tie/evening dress, no children. A non-religious civil ceremony followed by dinner and dancing, all in the same venue. Easy as. Why do people make such a fuss about it all?
The only thing we've disagreed on is the wedding list - I'd much prefer to let people surprise us with whatever they want, but since we're currently house-hunting, the girl wants to make a list. To be fair, as long as I'm allowed to put a 52" TV on the list, I'm probably not going to argue too much about it all.
Bittersweet
We got engaged in a helicopter over the Grand Canyon. I asked her through the static buzz of the chopper’s communication system and at first she wasn’t quite sure what I’d said to her, but when I opened my palm to offer her the £5.50 Cubic Zirconium stunt-ring, she got the point. She said yes and the pilot cheered, as Americans tend to.
We spent the next week happily exploring the achingly beautiful canyons and mountains of Arizona and Utah, before heading into Nevada’s exhausting desert heat for a few days R&R in Las Vegas. We’d joked about getting married there and her parents offered to fly out if we really wanted to do it, because they’re cool like that. The idea got bounced around, but neither of us was very serious about it, we both want our friends to be there on the big day.
After three nights in Vegas we started packing up to head out to California for the second half of the holiday, but she wasn’t feeling right. The hotel gave us directions to the hospital and, after a few hours of tests, a doctor who knew he didn’t have to sugar-coat it for us told us what we didn’t want to hear: no heartbeat at seven weeks. There’s still a chance, but you’re an educated woman, you understand what the situation is...
She was very brave, and talked calmly to all the medical staff, but when a kind faced old admin clerk noted that she’d had an ultra-sound and politely enquired if everything was going well, her voice finally cracked as she tried to explain that everything was not going well. She’d been so happy with it all, the picture of a woman ready to be a mother, it was horrible to see that change so quickly for her.
After some hastily re-arranged plans, long drives, and eight heart breaking hours in a Fresno emergency room, we finally accepted that we weren’t going to be parents this time around. An OBGYN in San Francisco took care of the loose ends and that night, after her cramps had subsided, we commiserated with a massive pile of crab-claws in garlic butter and a huge pitcher of beer at Fisherman’s Wharf.
The morning after, I took her to Bloomingdales to pick out a real ring to replace the ridiculously over the top fake she’d been wearing since the Grand Canyon. She cried a little on the plane home, as we finally said goodbye to what wasn’t meant to be, but by the time her parents picked us up at Heathrow she was ready to move on.
We’re both pragmatic, we know that this happens to one in four pregnancies, and we know that we didn’t lose a baby, just something that had the potential to become a baby but wasn’t quite right this time. It was a rough episode all the same – next time we’re not leaving the UK for the whole nine months.
Popping the question here = unlimited brownie pointsGoodbye and good riddance
Struggling to maintain interest in this, so I'm calling it a day (again) - at the moment I'm far more into writing stuff for Spin This, so that's where you'll find me from now on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
