Marriage Utopia!

King Triton get a postcard and ups his Atavan dosage.

So the kids are desperate to get married.   I’m fairly sure that all three of them have well hidden copies of Bride magazine under their bunk beds.  Even the boy.  The pages are probably marked by those colorful tab markers sticking out from the pages.  At last I’ve found my centerpieces!

The chatter about marriage is constant.  They come home from school to announce new prospects.  Sometimes a fight ensues when the doublets settle on the same person.  Eventually, they turn their discussions to other people they might wed and the appropriateness of the proposed matches.  We can’t marry one another, they say sadly.  We can’t marry a mom a dad or our teacher.  They know there is no inter species marriage either, so the chihuahua we babysat last weekend is out.  Through their toys, they live out their fantasy of what they imagine is marriage utopia.  In Toyland you’re free to marry whatever you love best.  If you love your Audi Hot Wheels car, then by God, marry it.  The toys around here get married a lot.  Little Mermaid Barbie has been married (to my count) four times, three of those to an automobile and once to Flounder, the infantile fish in Little Mermaid.  All that wishing to be part of our world got her nothing but a string of divorces.

All of this was brought on by me getting married again.  The stuff of Disney fairy tales was reenacted with, (could it be?) mom in the starring role.  It was like telling them we’d be spending the afternoon swimming with Nemo.  Yeah, you’re going to a gymnastics party this weekend?  Well my mom’s getting MARRIED.  Suck on that.

The other day I was picking the doublets up from school and ran into one of the dads.  His daughter is presently the topic of much dinner conversation.  There’s something of a negotiation going on nightly for her hand in marriage.  It’s like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride only instead of gold coins, this girl is bartered for with desserts.  So when I saw the dad, I mentioned this to him thinking he’d find it amusing and we could laugh about how adorable it all was.  Of course, I left out the bartering part because that’s creepy.

“Oh my kids just love _________.  In fact they’d like to marry her,” I said.

“She’s never getting married,” he said.

Which you know, kind of alarmed me.  I mean here are two willing candidates who love her so much they’re willing to trade their Fruit Roll-Ups so that their other sibling might gracefully step aside.  Not the regular Fruit Roll-Ups either, the ones with the patterns on them.  But he didn’t seem all that impressed.  What? I thought. They’re not good enough for your daughter?  We are talking about the girl with the perpetual candle of snot linking her nostril and her upper lip, right?  She’s yours right?  Oh okay, because you’re acting like she’s Miss America.

“Totally,” was all I could think of to say.