My darling current husband proposed to me on a bench in the middle of my hometown on a cold November day. We walked slowly back home, excitedly chattering over what had just happened. When we arrived back at my parents’ house, my mother was ready for us. She (of course) had been in on the plot and was ready to start planning the wedding immediately. She briefly checked in with us that we were fine with where she thought we should have the reception (kidding, Mom…) and we began a discussion of dates.
Dan (the Darling Current Husband) and I had always loved the idea of a September wedding, and that would give us 10 months to plan the thing. We didn’t want to force anyone to include us in their Labor Day weekend plans, so we looked at the Saturday immediately following… which was September 6th. Perfect.
Except… September 6th is my mother’s birthday.
Getting married on her birthday sounded like Bad Idea Jeans. Talk about selfish: Let’s throw a huge party on your birthday, and make you pay for it, and make it all about us! Plus, we knew all about the pain of sharing your birthday in my family. My brother had the same birthday as our cousin (though a few years apart), and since it was at the end of November, it often fell on or around Thanksgiving. So not only did my brother have to deal with sharing his birthday with a major holiday, but also with his younger cousin. Yuck.
My mom, however, was adamant. (You knew she would be.) She would like nothing better for her birthday than to watch us get married and celebrate with all of our friends and family. We acquiesced (as you knew we would) and plans moved forward, with the caveat from Mom that we were not allowed to mention her birthday at all when talking about The Big Day. She was gifting us her day for a year, and just shut up about it. (Or something. I’m paraphrasing.)
I pick and choose when to follow directions, however, and so the first slice of our wedding cake was served to my mother on her 55th birthday, and our wedding guests sang “Happy Birthday to You” loudly and with gusto. She wasn’t even too mad at us, though she did throw me A Look.
Stroll forward in time to 2005 — December 18th, 2005, to be exact. I was extremely pregnant. I’ve heard it said that you can’t modify the term “pregnant,” you either are pregnant or you aren’t. You can’t be “a little pregnant,” or “very pregnant” or “kind of pregnant.” This is garbage and clearly anyone who says this has not been pregnant. The kind of pregnant I was on 12/18/2005 is the kind from which you run away if you don’t actually have to be with the pregnant person in question. It’s the kind of pregnant that comes with anger and irritation and frustration and getting caught in a marathon of “A Baby Story” on TLC and not being able to control your tears in the onesie aisle of Target. The baby wasn’t due for 4 days (by whatever crazy formula the doctors use for that sort of thing) but I was done.
December 18 was a Saturday, and Dan’s brother had arrived to help Dan sheetrock the 2nd floor of our house. (Obviously, home renovations should always be done right before a newborn arrives, always.) I had read in one of the hundreds of pregnancy articles that my doctor begged me to stop reading that exercise could bring on labor. Therefore, I headed out into our back field to snowshoe the kid out of me (SCIENCE). Dan agreed to this plan only because he could see me from the upstairs windows, and because Sadie the dog came out and worriedly monitored my lumbering form.
I accomplished snowshoeing without disaster, but signs of labor were sadly lacking. Dan and I ate dinner (accompanied by the quart of ice cream that he loved to set on my roiling belly) and headed to bed. Well, he went to bed, and I went to the recliner as I had been unable to handle lying down flat for several weeks by then.
But wait! At 1am (1:18am, Dan will correct me) I awoke to a gush of liquid and immediately wailed, “DAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNN!” That husband of mine did his best to check all the father-to-be cliché boxes: grabbing bags, going back to grab more stuff, going out to warm up the car, helping me to the bathroom, helping me change my pants, all of it with a wild, hyper, Keystone Cops-esque type of energy that frankly wore me right out.
I’m not going to give you the labor story. It is a saga, and at some point I might figure out how to write it, but suffice it to say that at the end of that day, we had a baby.
What day? Well, the day before was December 18th, so the baby was finally born on the 19th. December 19th.
Also known as my parents’ wedding anniversary.
You read that correctly: we managed to steal the thunder from yet another one of my mom’s special days… and got my dad in on it for good measure. Oops!
To make up for it (!), we magnanimously allowed my mother to pick the date of our second child’s C-section (she only had a week’s window so it was really more of a gesture than anything). She did it with good humor and gravitas (yes, both) and our son appeared on the midsummer day of her choosing.
These Special Day thefts were on my mind yesterday as I took over everyone’s social media feeds with a) happy birthday wishes for my mom, b) happy anniversary wishes to my husband, and c) the obligatory HERE IS MY DAUGHTER SHE’S A SENIOR NO I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING post. I feel lucky that everyone is pretty jolly about the situation, and that it is now all simply family lore.
We probably just need to have more cake.
Thanks for reading.
Love, Susie
Wonderful story.