January 27: Wedding Bells

Dark today. The blues have got me. A friend texts. She’s getting married to her long-term boyfriend. He didn’t buy her a Christmas present (lucky she didn’t dump him right then and there) then popped the question in the new year on a long, windy coastal path on the south coast. Of course, I’m happy for them. But I’m also making loud unhappy bellowing noises, like a lost, lonely whale in the deep blue – at least on the inside.
I remember in sex-ed in school, we were once posed a question by our paedophile-esque, white-vest-wearing teacher: What should come first? Marriage? Sex? Children (obviously after sex)? Or love?
A gang of boys went for sex first. Fair game (think I was too much of a prude at the time). I can’t remember what I voted for but I think there was a general consensus that the traditional way might just have something going for it. I’ve ballsed things up, and I know it. I’ll never do the ‘traditional route’. Even if I one day find a man to marry, I’ll have Bump in tow, incorporating him into some misshapen step-family set-up. S/he will be fine, I try and reason. It will all be fine. But it’s not the best and I know it. I’ve never had step brothers / sisters… don’t know how that scenario plays out. Can’t imagine it’s a barrel of laughs. What if I have a whole Brady-bunch of kids with a new man? Bump will always be the odd one out. Then there’s the step-parent problem (which I know far too much about). Bloody awful, the lot of them. Alpha males with their bright ideas, coming in, taking head seat at the dining room table, carving the turkey. Sod off, the lot of you, I say. We girls can carve our own turkey perfectly well, thank-you very much. But have I inflicted a life-time of that on Bump? A life of different men (or even one man) around the kitchen table, trying to forge some unnatural relationship, tread the terrible tight-rope of parent and friend. I know how awful that is. I know that feeling of excitingly rushing home to visit mum, to be met by a stomach-full of disappointment when I see another car parked on the drive and I realise 'he's there too'. The thought of inflicting that on Bump is just gut-wrenchingly awful. I think, for me, that is the worst thing about all this mess. It makes me feel quite sick with sorrow.