DIARY OF A MIDDLE-AGED BRIDE



Welcome to my diary. The diary of a middle-aged bride. Yes...me.  Middle-aged. A bride....of sorts, not in a white, flowing dress but a bride nevertheless.

It sounds very strange to refer to myself as “middle-aged”. The picture that comes to mind when I think about that word is a wrinkly, Caucasian woman with red splotches all over her skin and dirty strawberry-blonde hair with a cigarette dangling from her lips! I certainly don’t fit that picture. I am a medium height (I use this term because I actually don’t know my true height. Most times, I will fill in 5”4 or 5”5 depending on my mood whilst I have no idea whether that is even close to accurate…but I suspect it is), brownish, plump, introverted, beautiful (I insist :-) ), 41 almost 42 year old woman. Phew!!!  That’s done away with. At my age, I shouldn’t struggle to describe myself but well..I do though am not so sure why.  

The bride part; I will insist on for purposes of this diary which I will share until we celebrate our 1st anniversary on 31st August 2020 (sounds like a hard task but I will give it a good try). Marriage anniversary not wedding anniversary is more like it since we had a traditional ceremony as opposed to a white wedding. Strangely enough, I dreamt about the white wedding a few days ago though my husband is vehemently against the idea. See, this is his 2nd marriage so he has been there and done that and gotten the divorce to prove it! Certainly, his attitude leans more towards that a wedding doesn’t make the marriage but I still want to see myself in a wedding gown; a peach coloured lace one with feathers in my hair. I have a 12 year old son and I too are no stranger to the pain and despair of broken relationships. But a girl (or a woman in this case) can still dream? Right?

I find it rather strange that I am now married. I used to desire it from a far, sometimes dream about it, admire it and certainly speak about it. What was self-defeating though, is that I never planned for marriage or behaved in any way as to draw this coveted institution into my life. One of my earliest memories about marriage was sitting in our living room in the house we grew up in Buruburu and vehemently declaring to everyone within earshot “I will never get married and I will become a lawyer”. I am not sure what inspired this declaration as I don’t recall any particular incident related to the two areas but I said it with a lot of passion. I repeated this phrase severally over the next few years into my teens and early 20s. I was never that girl that planned out how and when I would get married or wore a pillowcase as a veil over her head though I do remember trying on my mum’s wedding gown several times. I never had a thought as to what kind of a man I would marry or how many children I would have or even whether we would have a white picket fence or not! I was a very avid reader as a child and by the time I was in class 6, I had graduated from Famous Five, Secret Seven, Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley Highs and Hardy Boys to Mills & Boons, Harlequins, Sydney Sheldons and Danielle Steels. My older sisters were avid readers too so I read at their level since they were my “book suppliers”. I was deeply exposed to the romantics of relationships and marriage through my reading (very age inappropriate at times) but I still maintained my stand. The swooning romances only appealed to me in the fantasy world not real life. Interestingly, the vice versa seems to have happened. Yes to marriage and no...I am not a Lawyer..YET!. The law part is not for a lack of trying as I did study 1.5 years of law school in my 20s, I still deeply admire the law profession (and I know I would be great at it) and I have been enrolling for my law degree for the past decade. It’s my ever elusive goal which I am still determined to achieve as they say "by hook or crook”. A Lawyer in my 40s is still a Lawyer nevertheless. 

Well into my mid 30s and after having become a single mum at the age of 30, it finally dawned on me that I DID want to get married despite spending all my 20s and early 30s behaving & saying otherwise. When I look back, the journey to marriage has been certainly eventful with lots of kissing of the wrong kind…you know…with amphibians (frogs as they say) as opposed to the proverbial Prince Charming!! I will be sharing my journey to marriage over the last 20 years of my life but more importantly, I will share what it actually feels like to be finally married in my 40s.

Sincerely,


The middle-aged bride


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Just catching up on the Series? See the next posts below!


Ms. Froggie
Crazy, Stupid, Love! 
The Wilderness Years
The Whirlwind Part I
The Whirlwind Part 2



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