Engaged
By Hannah Hildreth
As I get older, and more of my friends get married, one question is posed more frequently in every day conversations - ‘How did he propose?’. It’s a fairly innocuous question, and one that no doubt fills many people with a bubble of excitement as they tell the tale. For me, though, I feel tense; I panic inside and wonder what I should say - ‘Oh, we were just at home, just a normal day - I was in pyjamas, I wasn’t even wearing a bra!’. A quick joke at the end to close the subject nicely, and an immediate ask of how they became engaged sidesteps it nicely.
The real story is a little more complex, and hard to explain during polite chit chat. I was at home that day and still in my pyjamas, as my husband-to-be Harry and I were full time carers for my Mum. The day we got engaged was New Year’s Day, and rather than starting 2015 with a hangover and happy memories of the night before, we were moving my Mum’s bedroom furniture around, so that she could get into bed without as much pain. She lay on my bed in the next room, asleep in the foetal position, childlike after more rounds of palliative radiotherapy. The day was long and tiring, and I was feeling exhausted and helpless as we tried to make things better, even just a little.
Halfway through moving her furniture, I became overwhelmed, and before I knew it I was in tears. Harry comforted me, and as we held each other I felt him begin to shake.
‘Are you crying?’ I asked him.
‘No’
‘Then why are you shaking? What’s going on?’
He straightened and turned away from me
‘Wait there’, he told me.
“What are you doing?’
‘Just...hold on a minute’
He turned and began rummaging in my Mum’s wardrobe, while I looked on, still upset and a little perplexed. He stopped, and did this exceptional sort of spin that landed him on one knee, a spin that I have since acted out to him since as it tickled me so much. Before I knew it he was gazing up at me, looking absolutely terrified, and asking me to marry him. In response, I laughed and asked him what he was doing, and eventually he said ‘Can you please say yes or no?!’. And just like that, we were engaged. We kissed, we embraced, and we continued to arrange the furniture so that my Mum could get back into bed.
Later that evening, I told her after I’d helped her to lay down ready to sleep. I watched her eyes light up as I smiled tightly, thinking that this was all wrong...where was the high-pitched squealing phone call, the cocktails or fancy lunch to celebrate, the moments I always thought I would have with my Mother. I realised I was telling her about my engagement with little hope of her being at my Wedding. It just felt all wrong.
Harry & I celebrated instead in our local Wetherspoons, a group of friends gathered at such short notice, drinking cheap champagne, and it meant the world. I was engaged on New
Year’s Day, lost my Mother on Valentine’s Day and was married on D Day, 6th June 2015. In the five years of our marriage, through the deep, endless grief for my Mother and my Grandmother, through house moves, new jobs, money worries, crippling anxiety, new adventures, and all of the joy and pain that every-day life has to offer, I have come to realise that it doesn’t matter how our marriage came to be.
I may still tense up when people ask me how we got engaged, but I know really that I shouldn’t, because marriage is so much more than the ring, than the romance or the wedding. My engagement, and my marriage was intrinsically linked to my Mother, and the timing of my Husband’s proposal meant that she passed knowing I would be married to a kind, supportive, warm man who she loved deeply. Life is rarely picture perfect, as the constant barrage of social media posts would have us believe, and there is so much beauty to be found when we abandon our expectations.