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So I’m cleaning out the garage today (better yet… trying) and I found a box of old pictures. It wasn’t even five minutes before my boys were in there with me digging through the piles (you’d be amazed at what will entertain a child on a long hot day). Leave it to my twelve year old to find and question to death a picture of my husband and his ex-wife. Nothing extraordinary (to me anyway LOL) just a picture of their wedding day. But to my son it was like discovering gold!!!

So there we were. One big happy family looking through a box of picture’s and my son is hopping up and down asking me a variety of loaded questions like, “Hey, where’s your wedding picture? Are you even married? Did you guys elope because you got pregnant?”

I knew that this day would come. My kids obviously knew their dad was married before (my stepson lives with us) but they had never questioned our relationship. Not that I have anything to hide. We got married and had a ton of kids; what more did they want to know? I started by saying of course we’re married to which he shot back, “Then where’s your wedding pictures?” That’s where I got stumped.

The truth is we got married by a judge during his lunch break. Why not in a church? Well…for starters I was pregnant or as some would say “knocked up.” We looked into getting married in a church but I was determined to get married in a Catholic church (in my opinion the last place you want to go and get married if you’ve been divorced). Being that I’ve never been married before I naively thought I could just stroll in there and pick a date. So you can imagine my surprise when I walked in there and was handed a stack of papers. I filled out each and every paper, took a seat, and anxiously waited for the official date. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before Father McGinnley told me that my husband needed to convert to Catholicism, (not a problem) and have his ex-wife sign and approve the annulment of their marriage (might be a problem). Oh yeah, we also had to pay a fee of about $1200 (ouch!). So here I was only nineteen, pregnant, and everything seemed so damn complicated unlike the way I answered my son.
No we didn’t have a traditional wedding but…what we do have is a box full of 12 years of happy memories. I’m not going to lie and say I stopped dreaming of walking down the aisle in that Vera Wang dress I had picked (okay...more like David’s Bridal)!