We’ve still got time

It’s become the trend lately, that every Thursday when we walk to our local coffee stand, Doug and I talk about weddings.  I read somewhere once – maybe in a Cosmo? – that the best time to talk to men about serious issues is while exercising, because their anxiety about whatever it is you want to talk about channels through their adrenaline.  Or something.

Anyway, this is what Doug is doing to me on these Thursday coffee walks.  We walk, and caffeinate, and I tell him about my last wedding, and what I want for our wedding, and how I feel about weddings in general.  These are not topics I like to talk about otherwise.  I’m much more comfortable pointing people to the photos from my first wedding, or shrugging off the next one by reminding everyone it’s not for another year and a half and I don’t have to plan anything yet, and I’ve tried not to think about weddings in general much these past few years.

For the record, I also don’t talk specifically about my future children much.  I say I want to get married and have babies, but as soon as the conversation goes that way, I don’t have much to add.  Doug can talk about how he hopes our future daughter gets my ears and his nose (he usually tries to say my nose, too, until I remind him that I don’t like my nose), but the conversation ends there.  I have nothing to add, because I can’t even imagine what our children will be like.  I have hopes for them – I hope they’re healthy; I hope we’ll have a bigger house with a yard for them to play in – but I can’t imagine them, specifically.  It’s too far away; there’s too much still to get through before I can think seriously about names and nursery themes.

But weddings – weddings are a little easier, because a little more time has passed since my last one, and a little less time remains before my next one, and a wedding is something over which I have a little more control than I do over my ability to grow a child.

So we’ve started talking about weddings on Thursdays; we look at (non-diamond) rings in Costco and I tell Doug what I like and what I don’t; we joke around with one of our coworkers who has a flair for floral arrangements about how much she’d charge for doing the flowers at our wedding; we have a guest list inasmuch as we talk about inviting “a table full of work people, a table full of old-dude-bike-riders, and a table full of blog friends.”  I told Doug I wanted no more than a year to plan a wedding – and that’s still true – but here we are, 17 months away, and kind-of-sort-of planning.

And I’m dealing with it.  Really, really well, actually.  It’s not for real yet, so I don’t have to make any final decisions, and imagining all the sunflowers and the one Hawaiian print tablecloth (while the adrenaline distracts me from my anxiety) is actually kind of fun.

And we’ve still got time.  Seventeen months is lots and lots of time to plan, and to get emotionally ready.  And physically ready: namely, the growing out and re-brunetting of my hair.

Because I’m dying my hair red.  Tomorrow.  Because we’ve still got time.