It’s funny when you get married and everyone you know is like, I thought you were already married.
When you have a one year old daughter and a mortgage together, is it really even that much of a momentous occasion when you do finally get married? I guess it is what you make of it. Some people make a big deal out of their birthdays, and most of the time their friends will get on board with that. My birthday (October 18) used to be very important to me, and over a period of five or six years, when I lived in the Bay Area, I threw an annual party with my friend Cassandra Dallett (also a Libra) at her house. It was called the Libra Party. We’d have a ton of food and drinks and there was always a poetry reading and open mic and a DJ and sometimes we even had a photo booth and karaoke. It was a real celebration. And it was fun. Sometimes it feels nice to be the center of attention, to give yourself and other people a reason to commend you, even if that reason is the mere fact that you were born in a particular month.
Having a kid has altered my perception of a lot of things and I’m way more inclined to use my energy to celebrate Zosia’s big moments over my own. My last birthday was extremely low key, and this one will be as well.
I suppose if I had really wanted to have a big, festive wedding I could have. I’m officially married now and we didn’t have a ceremony, though we may do that sometime in the future. Who knows? I kind of feel like no one else really cares if we do, so why bother?
On the last day of a short vacation for my sister’s birthday, Adrian and I filled out our marriage license paperwork with my sister and her boyfriend as witnesses. Our daughter was napping and we had the car packed up and it was a moment where nothing was happening. We were all waiting around to check out so we figured we would just get it over with. Anticlimatic.
A couple weeks before, we had a little engagement party in the form of a family dinner at Dante and Luigi’s (site of an infamous and unsuccessful mob hit on Nicky Scarfo Jr. by a gunman wearing a Batman mask) with Adrian’s parents who were visiting from the West coast and my parents and my sister and her boyfriend. It was cute. We got dressed up and took some photos before sitting down for chicken parm and pasta with red gravy, and maybe that’s celebration enough.
After the dinner we went back to my mom and dad’s house and Zosia got to blow out the candles on her first birthday cake. Well, she tried! We had been teaching her how to cool off her food using her breath and she got the mechanics of it down but her exhale wasn’t strong enough to extinguish the flames on her own, but she knew what to do and that’s what matters!
Congratulations on your wedding, Alexandra. And congratulations on your first birthday of being a mom.
Best wishes!
we have a very similar story! (also recently celebrated our kid's 1st, too :) I think it's partly generational, and therefore economic -- across class, college vs non-college, whatever demographic, almost all of our friend-couples our age, even w/ kids, are not married or had no (big) wedding. we still celebrate some anniversaries, tho. going down to the courthouse and having it done was very nice, it was a great moment, even though we rushed it in on a lunch break, and didn't even have a witness we knew -- but it felt much more like a confirmation of something already happening, already important, more than something new
congratulations!