#actually it might be a tad too big but ykw we’re working on it

[panb1mbo]

i’ve been married since i was a teenager and one of the more sane teen decisions i made was talking to my then boyfriend abt not buying me a fancy ring bc of ethics. well i got a recycled ring and the story of how my new (to me) engagement ring came to be is under the read more cause it’s someone else’s love story that set the stage for mine. i’m gonna try to do it justice, word count be dammed.

sometimes the family guilt is just so heavy it results in you getting cool shit. well my man’s horrible nana is basically dead to us, and long story short he got and gifted me an heirloom engagement ring. the ring with the best marriage history in his family. a ring owned and loved by a woman who oddly and eerily reminds me of myself a little too much for me to believe in coincidence. this ring was his great grandmother’s. she survived the great depression and like most traumatized girlies with a complicated past; she left ohio as soon as she was old enough to leave without being brought back home by becoming a navy nurse. i like to think it’s because that’s one of the least scandalous and seemingly most honorable ways a women could get a little bit of personal and financial freedom back in the olden days without people talking mad shit, and knowing what i do about the family history that seems right up her ally.

the ring came to be, because like me; she seemingly got married on a whim. but that “whim” lasted a lifetime. when she met the man she wanted to marry, she already knew she did not want kids. had known so for a while. being someone with a uterus in that time period, she just kind of assumed marriage wasn’t an option for her because she never wanted to commit to being a parent, and back then and still today (for some people) marriage and having a baby, (just like giving birth to a baby and choosing to parent a baby) are two very different, very personal choices to make. I think she was very aware of the dominant culture around her and couldn’t or wouldn’t let herself anticipate finding someone who could love her unconditionally, regardless of what she did or didn’t want to do with her body. At least, not until she met the man she fell in love with.

i think she really only had friends with benefits, or whatever the 50s/60s version of that is called. until that one friend she really liked eventually confessed he couldn’t have babies after she confessed she couldn’t marry because she didn’t want babies. apparently she changed her stance on the marriage thing really quickly after that, kinda how i changed my mind after i said i never wanted to marry before realizing it’s not inherently an act of marriage that sours relationships, but how people behave and treat their marriage. and since my husband’s in the picture, she either changed her mind about having kids after they found out whatever doctor told her husband he was infertile was so, so wrong. or they couldn’t access the reproductive care she needed and they made the choice to parent the only baby they ever had together the best that they could.