I Will Never Again Be a Bridesmaid.
I overheard some people discussing an upcoming wedding.
The woman was going to be a bridesmaid, having just recently gotten married herself. She and her husband are young, perhaps in their mid-twenties, and they have no idea what’s coming – or how fast it’s going to come.
I had a series of related thoughts:
I will never again be a bridesmaid.
Hopefully, I will never again be a bride.
I will never again have a baby, or a baby shower, or any of the things that come with giving birth.
I will never again be pregnant or breastfeed a baby.
In fact, my babies are almost grown. I will never have another child in elementary school.
I am old. I gave birth later in life, so it’s likely that I’ll be a very, very old grandmother – if I survive to be a grandmother at all.
I don’t have the luxury of waiting for grandbabies.
I rarely get invited to weddings, or baby showers, or kids’ birthday parties anymore.
I often find myself at funerals.
No one is asked to be a bridesmaid at a funeral. There are no squeals of delight there, like there are at baby showers. There is a lot of silence.
Sometimes there is laughter.
I hope there is laughter at my funeral.
I hope people remember my wedding, my baby shower, and those precious years when the babies were young and I was fat and all I cared about was staring at their little faces.
It’s still all I care about, although my kids are irritated now when I stare at them.
I am not sure that anything I did before giving birth mattered very much, if at all.
I am sure that people who don’t have children don’t understand this, even a little bit.
And I’m not sure I’m right.
But I am sure about the laughter.
I hope there will be laughter.