love and marriage (with a dusting of snow).

one of my dearest and oldest friends responded to my blog yesterday by thanking me for my honesty regarding pregnancy. she shared with me that she had felt a similar annoyance and cynicism while planning her wedding, a comparison i completely empathize with and have even made myself.

so, with a dusting of snow on the ground and two extra hours to spare before venturing to work (thank you for those happy thoughts!), i thought i would take a minute and draw my own comparisons between marriage and pregnancy.

first, a back story.

bill and i met my senior year of high school. ours was a fiery and spiraling romance and within three months, he had proposed. i was eighteen. i said, 'yes'. two years later, at the age of twenty, i took his last name.

at that point in my life, i was just beginning to shed my Tiger Beat days and stepping directly into Monthly Bride. i felt the expectations weighing heavily on me - the white dress, the perfect flowers, the guest list, the menu...the decisions that needed to be made never ended and because my parents disapproved of the timing of the wedding, i made many of them on my own.

and the wedding turned out to be beautiful.

however.

if i had it to do all over again, we would have taken the money and ran. we would have married some place far way - the cliffs of ireland, the mountains of colorado, the beaches of hawaii.

the lesson i learned is this:

a wedding is a blink in time. a marriage is forever.

i have carried that lesson around with me for a long time, unsure of when i would need that learning again. when we found out i was growing a baby, i reached into my back pocket and pulled that lesson out for review. the words had changed, but the message was the same.

a pregnancy is a blink in time. a child is forever.

i spent so much time and energy planning what i thought was everyone else's expectations of a perfect wedding. and while the wedding was beautiful, it did not in any way reflect bill or myself or who we were as a couple. i knew immediately that i did not want to make the same mistake with my pregnancy, as this is more than likely the only child we will have. this time, we do it our way.

so i am sorry if i seep negativity. i am sorry if my off-handedness offends you. i am sorry if you find me cynical. but this is mine. this is ours. the next 22 weeks are but a wrinkle. i am trying to plan for a life.

"Intimacy is what makes a marriage, not a ceremony, not a piece of paper from the state." - Kathleen Norris.

go well.