Altared (eBook)

taking the vow the child bride (and groom) julianna baggott Q THE BEGINNING I was only twenty-three years old when I got married Dave was twenty- six. By today's standards of arrested adult development, regression, and ever-rising life expectancy rates, I was a child, and maybe Dave was, too. In any case, that's what it felt like and, with each anniversary we celebrate, we seem to have been younger and younger way back when we got married. I met my husband, Dave, in grad school at the very first party of the year. A month later, we were on a road trip together. We pulled off I-95 to have sex in a Red Roof Inn, midday. This is astonishing only in that we were so damn poor. Sex at a Red Roof Inn was a huge luxury. There, perhaps inspired by the grandeur, lounging under the orange comforter, he told me that he wanted to spill his guts. I said, 'Okay.' He said, 'I really like you.' Now this didn't strike me as spilled guts. We'd been inseparable since we first met. He'd just taken me to a family reunion and, on the way, he'd met my parents. We'd pretty much covered the liking, even the really liking. I said, 'I don't think that constitutes having spilled your guts.' 'How about this?' He paused and then said, 'I'm in love with you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.' Now this, this was spilled guts. It was completely courageous and elegant--even amid the Red Roof Inn decor with its paintings bolted to the walls. I took it as a proposal. I said, 'Yes,' as in I accept, as in I do. 'I love you too.' I should stop right here and say that everything from here on out in this essay is foofaraw. This is the essential moment that Dave and I consider to be the start of our marriage--not the wedding itself. Embedded in every marriage, there is a true moment when your hearts sign on for good. It doesn't necessarily happen when the guy mows Will you marry me? into your lawn or trains a puppy to bring you a velvet box. It doesn't necessarily happen in the white hoop gown or because some exhausted justice of the peace says so. It usually happens in some quiet moment, one that often goes unregistered. It can happen while you're brushing your teeth together or sitting in a broken-down car in the rain. Some unplanned, unscripted moment. But when people ask about your wedding day, they want a grand story. Not something that ends with stealing mini hotel soaps and shampoo bottles from a Red Roof Inn. And so we make up another story. We create a grand affair. A GENERATIONAL FOOTNOTE We announced our engagement two months after the Red Roof Inn affair, and it's surprising now how unsurprised everyone was. It seemed like such a normal thing to do at the time--to fall in love, get engaged in three months, and get married in less than a year--at age twenty- three. And yet now, a decade and a half later, this seems like a terrible idea--a choice that only the destitute would make in a time of crisis. But this was all happening right on the cusp of a new generation of women. The generation that had gone before us and tested the you-can- have-it-all notion had come back and written up a sobering memo: Balancing family and work was much harder than they'd thought. My friends evidently were digesting the news. They started in on careers first. Their marriages, if they came at all, came late. Many have just gotten married in the last two to three years and now in their late thirties are starting to have their first children. All that needs to be said here is this: I missed the memo completely. Was I out drinking? Was I too distracted writing poems on cocktail...