Twenty Eight Years Is Not Enough

Twenty nine years ago today I married Kirk. I said quite a while ago that I would eventually explain how it happened, and today seems to be the right day for it.

The last “chapter” of the story I told you was how he drove to Vermont to ask me to “pick” him, which of course I did. That was in my first semester in college, and as you can imagine, all that drama was not well aligned with academic excellence. As such, I left school after that first semester. The specifics of whether I left or they asked me to leave are now a bit hazy, but suffice it to say that I did not return for another semester. My plan was to return home and attend school at a local four year college beginning the following fall. I have no doubt my parents were terribly disappointed, and rightfully so.

I came home and lived with my mom, and returned to my old job at the restaurant where Kirk and I first met. He now managed a different restaurant so we didn’t see each other at work every day. It was a hard time for us – even though I had elected to stay with him, the fallout of me almost ending the relationship took a toll on us, and I wondered whether the relationship would last. Ultimately though, our genuine affection and enjoyment in each other prevailed, and by the summer, we were really happy together again and marked one year together in July.

In October, we moved in together. I think we both did not really distinguish between living together and being married – we both had the “it’s just a piece of paper” mindset. We had not really talked about marriage, although when he talked about the future he always spoke as if we would be in it together. I didn’t think that far in advance – I was happy with the way things were.

Soon though, shortly before Christmas, he asked me to marry him. I would love to tell you it was romantic and memorable, but it wasn’t really. We were just talking and he said he wanted to marry me – soon. I realized he meant it and wanted me to actually answer. I had no urge to get married. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to marry him someday – it was more that I hadn’t really thought about it and didn’t feel it was necessary at that point. He felt really strongly about it though – he had realized that the “piece of paper” had a lot more meaning than we were giving it credit for, and he wanted to make that commitment.

To understand my mindset about this decision, you need to understand how I felt about marriage in general at that point in my life. My parents had split up about three years before this, and it had been a shock to me. My perception of their marriage was that it was largely happy, certainly happier than most of my friends’ parents. When it ended, it left me with the impression that even good marriages are little more than a crap shoot. So as I thought about marrying, I truly believed that no amount of waiting or thinking would increase the odds of my marriage lasting. I thought it either would or it wouldn’t, and did not see myself as really able to control or impact it.

In retrospect, it was a ridiculous approach to marriage, but I really believed it. I knew I loved Kirk, I knew he loved me, and given my opinion that we had no control over the likelihood of lasting marriage, I decided to say yes. My main concern was my parents – I knew they would not be okay with me getting married so soon, especially since I had not yet gone back to school. I wanted to get engaged, break the news to them, and then get married in a year or so, after starting back to school. Kirk really wanted to get married quickly – the living together thing was just not enough for him. So we compromised with the following (brilliant) plan – we would get married at the town hall without telling anyone, then in the next few months tell everyone we were engaged, I would start school in the fall, and we would set a “wedding” date for a year or so later, which would give everyone the opportunity to get used to the idea. The next day, I called the town hall, and scheduled our wedding for 10 a.m. December 29 – only about ten days away.

We did not invite (or tell) anyone. On the day of our wedding, we overslept, and when we woke up we had to scramble to get ready. He wore a suit, I wore a beige pencil skirt, cream silk blouse, and beige high heeled sandals (side note: when Erika was about 5, she found a bridesmaid dress in my closet that I had worn in a friend’s wedding. She loved it and asked if it was the dress I married Daddy in. I said no, and showed her the skirt and blouse I was married in, which I had kept for sentimental reasons. She took one look at the outfit, expressed her disgust at the complete inappropriateness of this boring outfit, and flounced off.)

We were twenty minutes late, and the justice of the peace was exasperated because he had to pick up his daughter at the airport. He asked us where our witnesses were, and we told him we didn’t know we needed any. This really aggravated him and he couldn’t believe that we didn’t know we needed to have our marriage witnessed. I told him I thought witnesses were only in old Westerns. He said his clerks could witness the wedding for $50 each. We said no – there was no way we were going to pay someone. Finally, he agreed to marry us anyway, and give us the marriage certificate to take to someone to sign and then we could bring it back and file it with the court. So that’s what we did. He read a short, but actually very nice, reading, had us take our vows, and declared us married. The whole thing took about 10 minutes, and there were only the three of us in the room. Then we took the certificate down the road to the restaurant Kirk managed, told two people who worked there what we had done, swore them to secrecy, and had them sign it. We drove it back to the town hall, and gave it to a grumpy clerk who clearly thought we should have paid her the $50.

We went home, packed up the car (a black Camaro that at the time was super cool), and drove to Toronto for a long weekend/honeymoon. We saw the hotel right off the expressway as we drove into the city – we had missed the exit. I then got one of my first lessons of married life. I wanted to get off at the next exit, get back on the expressway going in the opposite direction, and get off at the right exit – obvious right? But no – he told me he does not turn around, because it is like admitting he made a mistake. So he kept driving and driving, trying to find an alternate route. He stopped for directions several times, which only made it worse because no one knew where to send us, and none of them wanted to admit it. We drove around and around and finally ended up back at the hotel approximately four hours later. That was the first of many times in our marriage that I had to wait out a driving error. Nonetheless, we had a great few days, happy together with our secret.

About three months later, we still had not told anyone of our “engagement” – I was still working up the nerve. He didn’t push – he was content to let me set the pace. But then, we discovered I was pregnant. It must have happened about mid-February, when we had been married only about six weeks. I was THRILLED - I may not have had high regard for marriage, but parenthood was something I always wanted. School would have to wait. Meanwhile, Kirk was terrified. Partly because he wanted us to have more time with just the two of us before having a baby, but mostly because he was so afraid something would go wrong for me or the baby.

We decided we’d better tell people we were married. I suspect our parents were not terribly shocked about the pregnancy – I think when we called and said we wanted to get together to talk with them they pretty much assumed there was a baby on the way. It was the marriage that surprised them. To their great credit, they all handled it very well, and were supportive and accepting. I know that they must have been very concerned that we were in over our heads – we were SO young.

So we never had the “wedding” we planned. Once everything was all out in the open and Erika was on the way, there didn’t seem to be much point. As a parent of adult children now, I often think that I would be crushed if one of my children did what we did, because we deprived our parents of the very special moment of seeing their child marry. I have never regretted not having the big fancy day for me, but I do regret taking that moment from our parents. For Kirk, his only regret was the proposal itself - although it never bothered me, he came to hate the fact that he did not make it a special event.

We did have a very nice party at my grandparents’ home that our family hosted as a substitute for a reception. Erika arrived eleven months and three days after we were married, and Matt came along eighteen months later. And that’s how we began – a lot of love, but not much in the way of fanfare or romance.

Four years ago, we went on a cruise for our twenty-fifth anniversary. Before we left, I looked and looked for a card that would say what I wanted to tell him. I didn’t find one, so I bought a blank one. As I struggled with what to write, it pretty much came down to one thing – I wanted more. Twenty five years was not nearly enough. So that’s what I wrote. After he died, I found that card in a wooden box he kept on his dresser. How true it still is – it just was not enough.

I am so very sad today. I am trying to feel lucky and appreciative, but in the end, I am mostly just so sad. I look at the picture that was taken of us last year on this day, and we look so happy. Little did we know it would be our last.

How ironic that a marriage that ended up working so well started with so little thought. I made the best decision of my life for all the wrong reasons. I said yes, even though I had no confidence it would last – not because of him or us, but because I held little faith in marriage itself. In the end, I really said yes to make him happy. And in the end, he made me happier than I could ever have hoped for.