Happy April Fool’s Day, alternately known as my wedding anniversary. It’s the 16th one, commemorated by toilet paper or broken china or something like that. My beloved lies snoring in the other room, occasionally irritated by the racket that I make in the kitchen every morning around 5am. One must have one’s tea.
I stopped reading women’s magazines when I was about 22. All the quizzes suggested that I’d better be ready to settle down with low maintenance pets and a penchant for crochet projects that never quite get finished. What I knew about marriage or children could fit on the back of a sugar packet. What I knew about myself was that I wasn’t very good at crocheting.
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
In 1998, I moved up to Minneapolis, leaving behind a dead-end job and a dead-end relationship. Impatient to get on with things, I placed an ad online, in the quaint days of free Yahoo personals, in order to get back into dating. 27 responses later (26 of which I think were written from a prison library computer), I met him. We exchanged emails and phone calls for a couple of weeks and then, after I ran a background check, drove by his street address and emailed all his relevant information to a friend (Subject: If I am dead, THIS guy did it), we went on a date.
“There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.”
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Two years later, we got married. I was 32. He was 35. It was the beginning of a long line of compromise and arguments over house projects and why I didn’t want to spend yet another holiday with his family. I kept my name. He got a wedding. I wanted to get married in a park with a justice of the peace and ten people, to whom neither of us was related. We ended up getting married in a Lutheran church with a gillion people I didn’t know, but who seemed to like him very much.
As a requirement of the church, we had to meet with the pastor a couple of times for “the talk” before the date. Not that talk. She asked us a lot of questions about our 
families and on a big whiteboard, drew our family trees side by side. On my side, divorce, suicide, alcoholism, more divorce, death by misadventure (usually while drunk) and another divorce or two for good measure. On his side, married for 50+ years, or until one of them dropped dead. For generations. The pastor smiled wryly. This might be something you want to think about as you prepare to make a commitment.
“You know what a learning experience is? A learning experience is one of those things that says, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
While my husband-to-be took it in stride, I thought we’re totally screwed. If anybody is going to mess this whole thing up, it will be me. Planning the wedding could have been the ending point. I didn’t want to wear white or spend time or money shopping for all things bridal. I didn’t even like church. Or groups of people in general.
Anything traditional gave me the heebie-jeebies. But he was rather happy about getting married, so I tried my best to do the bride thing, which included breaking out in hives the night before our wedding. I look back on our pictures and all I see is him smiling, surrounded by the people he loved most and I’m so grateful that I didn’t behave like a complete shit.
“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
One early morning, four years later, I calmly announced to him that I was pregnant. I get spookily calm when I’m losing my mind and panicking. Too many years of singlehood caused my brain to turn in on itself. Pregnant?! Oh wait, this is a good thing. It is, right? His silence gave me pause. Then I realized he was still asleep.
“Don’t Panic.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
In the early hours of a chilly April morning, after hours of her mother swearing while sitting on a yoga ball, our girl came into this world dramatically. So I hear. I was completely stoned after having a complicated and unexpectedly scary delivery. My husband was traumatized, as he was not stoned and had to be a witness to it all.
We were ready for her. I say that, because after years of working out our differences, clearing out the extraneous furniture (older meant two households) and learning that sleep was often preferable to cuddling, we’d settled down a bit. We were ready to learn more.
“Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.”
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
This kind of life is not for everyone, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. I’d like to believe that if I’d never met him, never had her, that I would have found my way to a loving circle of friends and a purpose that gave me joy. But now that I know and love them, now that they are a part of my soul, every April I celebrate like a happy fool.
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Note: When I was a child, every Saturday I would listen to the BBC production of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on the radio. A few weeks ago, my daughter asked if I’d read to her at bedtime like I did when she was younger. We’re reading the whole 5-part trilogy by Douglas Adams. Even if you’re not a science fiction fan, the wordplay and nonsensical joy of this series is a lovely escape.
The Green Study 