Chapter 3
What nobody sees
What was really going on for you? What were you thinking or feeling that other people didn't know?
My wedding was planned for September 2019. Yes, *my* wedding. I know there were two of us getting married, but let’s be honest: I’d been planning my day. I asked my husband whether we could postpone it until after I’d given birth. “No, no. The venue is already booked.” We were getting married in France, at a beautiful estate in the Val-d’Oise. The kind of place you walk into and immediately imagine your wedding photographs. So the venue was staying. Then I went back to the bridal shop. They couldn’t refund my deposit, but they could adapt the dress by adding a lace-up back. Laces. To my dream dress. Was everyone expecting me to adjust as easily as the corset? My husband and I came close to arguing about it. I wanted the wedding and the birth to be separate events. I’d had a perfectly good plan: religious wedding, baby, legal wedding, another baby. Then perhaps a third a few years later. There was an order to things. In my head, at least. Besides, if I walked down the aisle pregnant, nobody would believe I was a virgin any more. The three-and-a-half-year-old might already have raised a few questions, but still. Seriously, though, I didn’t want to feel exhausted, uncomfortable in my body, or ready for a nap on one of the most important days of my life. I wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to feel beautiful in the dress I’d chosen, without wondering whether I’d need to sit down halfway through everything. My best friend and my cousin stepped in and got on with changing the hen-do plans. Apparently, the original programme had included a bungee jump. For the record, pregnant or not, there was absolutely no chance I was doing that. This baby had already saved me from one questionable decision. Everyone welcomed the pregnancy with so much happiness. Whatever needed rearranging, we were having another baby, and that was wonderful news. By then, I’d been living in London for ten years. Very few people from the place where I’d grown up had seen me pregnant with my first son. Some hadn’t even met him. Now they’d be there to celebrate our marriage, meet the family we’d already built, and see that another little one was on the way. Slowly, I began to see something beyond the timetable I’d made for myself. I could still have a beautiful wedding. I could still enjoy my day. And being pregnant, surrounded by the people we loved, might be a blessing I hadn’t thought to plan for.
