From Here to Maternity

Ed and I, we said “We’re Done”  and with bands of second-hand gold we left our wedding party behind.

We went as far as the local motel.  Where we sat with some family and friends, talking and drinking into the night.  And getting stoned.  That lovely thick smoke wove its magic through the close quarters of the tiny room, dropping its sweet scent into the fabric of my lace wedding dress and Ed’s hired suit. Kids playing at dress up. Kids who, less than twenty-four hours before, had gone and got themselves married!

Love is such a strange collection of heartbeats.  If ever I were to paint a picture of love it would be abstract in the extreme.

I fell in love with Ed the moment I saw his father, Dr Streams, pushing the Hoover around with great authority and care while keeping an eye on the roast beef cooking in the oven.  Mrs Streams, meanwhile, was relaxing in the garden, the newspaper in her lap, a cigarette in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other.  To me, with my intensely neurotic mother about whom hovered the constant threat of inflammatory tension, the contrast was stark and vivid.  And it was good.  Suddenly I saw marriage as possibly a more manageable affair, a relaxing situation where we could work together and sit back and let it happen. Plus, Ed was good in bed but then, so was I!

We didn’t have a honeymoon, thinking it was enough to have the wedding and so the next day, Sunday, we ambled back to the house to clean up, have a family lunch and unwrap our brand new collection of assorted casserole dishes which everyone seemed to think that, as a newly married couple, we would be most in need of.  Our polite request, upon being asked for gift suggestions, for the complete boxed set of Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums fell on deaf ears.

With final goodbyes of love and gratitude behind us we set off for the beach for a dose of From Here to Eternity. Sun, sand and rolling in the surf for the two days we took off from work, neither of us at that stage possessing anything resembling careers.  But Ed was restless and it was then I discovered Ed did not do leisure at the beach, not without having something better to do and without anything better to do I also discovered that Ed enjoyed the fine art of plotting and planning. For the future.  We sat, we talked and two days later we drove back to town where Ed promptly resigned from his office job and enrolled as a full-time student in preparation for entry to med-school.

If we were poor before we were definitely poor now and with every spare penny which came our way from my job, from Ed driving taxi cabs and tutoring pimply kids at their Maths, we paid our way and scratched and saved for the travel fund.  We might not have had much of a social life but we had a damn good sex life!  It was so damned good I lost track of where in the cycle my eggs were falling until slowly the suspicion dawned upon me that they might not be falling anytime soon.

We couldn’t afford a pregnancy test kit, short-term, how could we afford a child at this stage, long-term? Six weeks after the wedding we were back at Ed’s parents house for Sunday lunch.  Ed quietly took his father aside, asking him if he would please do a quick test on the urine sample we had brought with us. Dr Streams took it into his surgery which was off the dining room.  He returned with a broad smile, confirming for me what my body was telling me.

We were going to be calling him “Grandpa” far sooner than we had ever anticipated.