I’m not going to lie and say I’d never pictured being proposed to, or what my wedding day would look like.
When I was little, we were all a bit preoccupied with weddings. There were plenty of schoolyard marriages done next to the sandpit (shoutout to Bill Huggins wherever you are, my very first husband at the ripe old age of 7).
Engagements and marriages were a twice-weekly occurrence between our many Barbies and our two Ken dolls (renamed as Mohammed and Buckethead for reasons that elude me as an adult). The dolls would be made to delicately kiss during the ceremony. Later, in the Barbie Dream House, clothes would be flung aside and they’d be passionately mashed together, revealing to any passing adult that we actually had no idea what really happened on a wedding night.
I suppose when I pictured my own proposal and wedding day, it had all the elements I’d come to associate with these things: a guy down on one knee, a ring, a white dress, a reception centre that could cater to a ridiculously large family, a big cake, dancing the Macarena and the chicken dance in uncomfortable shoes on a dangerously slippery dance floor.
My own proposal and wedding turned out to be quite different.
Getting engaged
There was no ring. There was no knee. What there was was a tiny motu (island), white sand, lots of sun, and turquoise water.
We were in the Gambier Islands, stopping for lunch as part of our day tour.
We were splashing around in the lagoon. Martin turned to me, smiling, and asked, seemingly out of the blue, “hey, do you want to marry me?”
I grinned back. “Yeah, I think I do,” was the answer.
I jumped on him and we kissed. The grumpy couple and tour guide waited impatiently in the boat for us to finish making out so we could leave.
Getting married
We had a bit of a deadline with the end of my visa fast approaching, so we decided to do a small town hall wedding in Mo’orea, then do the proper thing at some point later down the track.
We walked into the local mairie at Teavaro. The lady there gave us the reams of paperwork required to get married. Translated birth certificates, statements saying I wasn’t already married, passport scans.
“When can we book it in?” Martin asked.
The lady regarded her calendar and frowned. “It’s busy, we won’t be able to do it for… three weeks or so.”
Three weeks later, I donned a simple white dress and a tiare flower crown made by the ladies down the road. Martin wore a blue shirt and his own crown. We went with his siblings and a few visiting friends to the town hall where we said the words and signed the papers.
Afterwards, we all drank some champagne and had a leisurely lunch at the restaurant in the airport.
A week later, I found out I was pregnant with Auguste.
A year later
We ditched the baby with his grandma and went back to the airport restaurant for a celebratory lunch!
It was a crazy year last year, getting engaged, married and pregnant in pretty quick succession. If you’d told me when I was little, in the sandpit, that this was what my wedding would like like, I’d probably have laughed at you. But it was all perfect in it’s own unique way.
Now, I’m looking forward to spending year two of our marriage with our newest little family member.
May art download - going postal!
A few weeks I wrote about making hand-painted postcards. Well, I’ve turned some of these into digital postcards for you to send to friends, family, or whoever else you like.
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