UPFRONT:MY BOYFRIEND and I are talking marriage. It is turning out to be the least romantic conversation of my life. I wouldn't mind but we are only having this endless wedding debate because we went and got ourselves in the family way. I should point out we were perfectly happy with our co-habitating, living over the brush status before that pleasantly surprising development occurred.
Now, most evenings I am kept awake at night by the worry that my reluctance to go along with cultural traditions and social norms is going to prove detrimental to the legal status of the child and the child's father.
So I toss and turn and fret about the fact that the child will be cast into legal limbo just because we couldn't be bothered getting hitched. Ergo I am already a bad mother before I've even had a chance to put the child straight from birth on to those ready-to-use prefilled milk bottles or administer unnecessarily large doses of Calpol at the first sign of a temperature.
I've been thinking recently that there's a lot to be said for doing things the right way round. As in: 1 Fall in love. 2 Get married in traditional fashion with white dress, beef or salmon and dodgy wedding band. 3 Get up the duff.
But, oh no. That would be too pedestrian. This handy 12-step guide to my relationship and marital history shows how complicated you can make things if you try really, really hard:
1 Turn 21. 2 Start panicking that will be left on shelf forever. 3 Meet lovely Bosnian man in London pub. 4 Get married. 5 Have celebratory meal in Garfunkel's with noisy road works outside the door. 6 Follow with reception in grotty flat where sausage rolls are served and the whiff of next door neighbour's hash hangs in the air. 7 Four years later get divorced. 8 Cry me a river. 9 Meet lovely Nordy man in the middle of a riot. 10 Move in together. 11 Eight years later get pregnant. 12 Worry incessantly about inheritance rights and next of kin issues and about whether the father will have as much right over the child as I will.
All of which leaves me in a dilemma. To marry. Or not to marry. That is the question. I have a friend who has been with her partner for 22 years. They are parents to two teenage boys but never got married because my friend is ideologically opposed to an institution which originated in a time when women were treated like chattels. She confesses the lack of a marriage certificate has been problematic over the years. The two of them were able to sign a form which meant her partner had joint guardianship of the children, but essentially he has far less rights as a father than he would have had they tied the knot.
Marriage, it seems, means a much easier life paperwork-wise, and in fairness my boyfriend is going to be busy enough changing nappies without the added annoyance of filling out forms. And yes, I know I am lucky even to be considering the idea of marriage. My gay friends haven't got the option, and I hope this changes soon.
I toss and turn and think about how, if we were married, my boyfriend/husband would automatically enjoy the full package of rights regarding our child. This would mean I couldn't just run off with little Pocahontas (keep your hair on the name is just one of several we are considering, including Sparkle) to Australia embarking on a wild affair with, say, Brad Pitt, without expecting some recourse from a legal system determined to protect the father's rights.
But what's really keeping me awake is the idea that the minute the child is born, the co-creator of said child, the man without whom none of this would have been possible, will not be recognised by the State as having full fatherly rights. Even if we did a DNA test to prove parentage, he would have about as many rights over the child as the postman. It seems that because I am the only one of us biologically capable of carrying the baby, this half-a-banana-sized-being is more my child than his. Which doesn't seem at all just or fair. "Life isn't fair," says my mother, swearing that if she has to listen to one more marriage conversation she is evicting us.
When she is out of earshot, we make a list. Of all the people we would invite. Of restaurants where we could have lunch. Of friends who might do the music. Of the kind of champagne we might serve.
And it's while writing the lists that I realise I am just not in the mood for a party, for organising things, for figuring out seating plans, for listening to speeches. I hate weddings at the best of times. Why, I muse, would I put other people through something I've never been keen on myself.
"The thing is," I say to my boyfriend who, had he only met and fallen in love with a normal woman, might already be married and settled down with a couple of kids in a nice semi-d in Portadown. (He looks worryingly wistful whenever I point this out.) "The thing is, we could just tell no-one, go down the registry office, get two strangers to act as witnesses and Bob's your mother's brother. We could elope! Even if it's just eloping to nowhere more exotic than Sir Patrick Dun's registry office on Grand Canal Street. 'Shotgun wedding. Done,' as Gordon Ramsay would say."
"I see. So you'd tell no-one? Not one person? You'd keep quiet about the whole thing and we'd get married without any fanfare and without you writing a big soul-searching column in The Irish Times Magazine?" he says, with a look that can only be described as incredulous. I think I had better think it through again.
roisin@irish-times.ie