I’ve been married for a little more than a month and if there’s one thing I didn’t realize about being a newlywed, it’s that people say some weird stuff to you.
It started almost immediately. In fact, it started before I even made it to the reception.
I caught a bug the day before our wedding and spent the night praying to the porcelain gods. My empty stomach hit me after the ceremony, and, again, cookies were tossed.
If you feel sorry for me, get it out of your system now. No bride wants to be pitied. Are you good? Good.
Now that that’s over with, yes, I puked at my wedding. I opened the grand, double doors of the pristine, white building, held up the skirt of my dress, and vomited right out of the venue.
Then I pulled myself together.
But that doesn’t mean everyone didn’t already know what happened before our first dance. Does anyone have an aunt that isn’t a gossip? Oh, you do? That must be nice.
I didn’t make it through the reception without someone asking if I was pregnant. The idea alone almost brought the Pepto Bismol up all over again. My mother-in-law later commented that, if I had been pregnant, it would have made it all worth it. Worth it for who?!
My sisters-in-law joke (I think) that we have pregnancy pacts. One has us birthing children together in five years and the other in two.
Now, I would like to have children someday. Someday far in the future. So far in the future you need binoculars. A telescope, maybe.
If there are any moms reading this, I’m sure your kids are great. But I’m still not even sure how to cook white rice without turning it into mush. And, while at a baby’s birthday party over the weekend, I laughed at a toddler who cried because he was standing under a sprinkler getting wet — but he didn’t move.
I didn’t think that I’d have to tell my in-laws so soon after the wedding that my womb is far from open for business.
The weird, just-married comments aren’t just about having kids. There were discussions about what kind of china I should register for, whether I was going to stay at my job, and if Chris and I suddenly had enough dough to buy a house.
About a month after the wedding, I cut my hair. It was one of the less life-altering decisions I made this year. Or so I thought.
But according to a coworker who’s around my mother’s age, now I’m a real adult. The haircut made me look more like a married woman.
It was that simple.
All I had to do was sit in the chair and watch inches of hair fall on the ground around me. I could have skipped the whole white dress thing and just bought a pair of scissors.
I guess I don’t really know what my point is. But if there are other brides or newlyweds out there reading this, at least we can laugh together about the questions we don’t know how to answer and the comments we don’t want to hear.
