My I Do Taboo

My mother wondered why my boyfriend hadn't asked for my hand.

“Because I need it," I joked.

“When is he going to ask you to marry him?”

“Mom,” I groaned. “I’m not a Barbie doll sitting around hoping Ken will pop the question. We’re equal partners. If we want to marry, we’ll decide together to marry.”

This wasn’t a lie. It just wasn’t the whole truth. The story of our romantic relationship was complicated. As I helped my devoutly religious mother make up two beds in two different rooms in my childhood home — no daughter of hers would “live in sin” under her roof — I wondered how to confess and come clean. I was a rebel without a cause. I was an unconventional conformist. I was outwardly resisting a tradition while secretly upholding the institution.

What I’m trying to say: I was married.

Let me explain.

The summer of 1974, I graduated from high school, turned 18 and, with money earned at the mall, bought a round-trip ticket to Switzerland. I had a vague plan to “see Europe" for a few weeks. More than three years passed before I returned to the USA.

In those pre-internet days, we stayed in touch through snail mail. I sent postcards. I wrote aerograms. When I had a stable address, they wrote back. Long distance phone calls were expensive expensive so I phoned home only once on my first Christmas away. From India.

It did not go well.

I cannot exaggerate how unusual this adventure was for a girl like me.

The only people I knew who had traveled overseas were in the military. And some of them didn’t come back.

I grew up in a large, Irish Catholic family in a comfortable blue-collar neighborhood, a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis. The mothers on our block were homemakers. The dads worked as roofers, bricklayers, and gas meter readers. My father carpooled about 45 minutes each way, to an oil refinery where he purchased the pipes, valves, nuts, and bolts necessary to keep the place operating.

Two girls in my high school class got pregnant senior year. A third sat across from me in one class knitting loopy pink-and-blue booties for, she said, her hope chest. Some of my friends had full-time jobs lined up after graduation. Others planned to continue living at home so they could afford to attend the university’s urban campus. A handful joined the military. I didn’t know what I wanted other than none of the above.

I knew life could be short and was determined not to waste a minute of it.

When a girl in my English class said she’d signed up for a meditation course in Italy and was having second thoughts about traveling alone, I jumped at the chance to join her. I landed a job in the kitchen in exchange for room and board and all the meditation time I could steal. Three months later, my friend confessed she wanted to return home instead of exploring the continent as we’d planned. So I set off with a boy I’d met busing tables to see the world like a couple of misguided Marco Polos.

We hitchhiked through Italy and Greece to Turkey where a woman picked us up with the warning that we were risking our lives with our thumbs. After that, we hopped rickety local buses overland through Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to India when the boy phoned his parents for money and within hours, was back in England. And I was alone.

I’d been in India about two months when I met Jonathan. He’d grown up in Wales, attended university in England, and worked in Nepal. He was in India for a mini-vacation. Long story short: We fell in love, worked in the Himalayas for about 18 months, then moved to England for an additional 18 months.

The first time Jonathan proposed, I said no.

Odds were the marriage wouldn’t last so I figured, why bother? But when we decided to move to the States a few months later, visas posed a problem that a legal union could easily remedy. So, the second time Jonathan suggested marriage, I said yes. But under one condition: We’d have a quick civil ceremony and tell no one. If we were still together in a few years time, we could talk about doing a “real” wedding and invite family and friends. Remember, I hadn’t seen my family in three years and didn’t want to show up at their doorstep with a husband in tow.

That first visit home felt surreal. Everything looked the same. I’d changed. But it seemed as though no one was particularly interested in knowing how or why. The idea of announcing that I’d returned with a husband was out of the question. So I kept quiet.

Jonathan and I moved to Oregon. We were young and broke. More than a year passed before we could afford to visit Minneapolis again. The occasion was my big sister’s traditional white-dress-and-veil wedding. This wasn’t the right time to announce our own. Again, I kept quiet. Another year and a bit rolled by before our next visit to Minneapolis. This time, it was for the baptism of my sister’s baby. Again, our timing was off.

If we weren’t too broke to stay in a hotel, I might have gone on rationalizing why our matrimonial union should remain in the closet forever after. But Jonathan grew tired of the basement guest room accommodation charades.

So I decided to tell my mother. By phone. The conversation went something like this:

“Mom, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” I began.

“Yes?”

“Jonathan and I are married.”

“I see.”

“In fact, we’ve been married for quite some time.”

“Oh?”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

“Mmm.”

I was confused. The woman had been bugging me for almost four years to get married and here she was sounding perfectly disinterested in my big announcement. It made no sense. I thought the phone had gone dead. But then I imagined the gears turning in my mother’s head about this back-dated secret wedding and understood her reluctance to celebrate.

“Mom,” I said. “I am not pregnant.”

I believe her shout of “Hooray!” still can be heard echoing through the universe.

I must admit he story of our secret wedding is funny only in retrospect.

But forty-four years, two daughters, and one grandchild later, Jonathan and I are still (mostly) happily married.

And my mother, now 93 years old, remains my favorite confessor.