How to plan a wedding in just three weeks

Last Friday, I got married. Married! Moi! To a man! Not a cat, not a mop, not an ambitious travel plan, not an abstract idea! A real live man!

For those of you who have known me at least somewhat over the years, this may come as a bit of a surprise. I know this because after posting the first of the official wedding photos on my Facebook wall (the one where the laser cats made their presence known), I was inundated with emails and messages expressing a rather united front of total surprise. I think I may have forgotten to note that we’d been dating (or, more precisely, shacked up), much less gotten engaged.

But yes, we had been and we did.

After nearly forty years of faffing about, the prodigal daughter finally came home to roost (metaphorically speaking, kind of).  When I make my mind up about life altering changes, I can be brutally, swiftly and abruptly thorough.

Now, if you happen to have read my last post, the one where I dropped the twin Fat Man and Little Boy bombshells announcing both my imminent betrothal and motherhood, you’ll at least know that this post wasn’t coming wholly out of left field. I did give you some warning, at least. Kinda. I would go so far as saying that it was a fair warning, as I’d thought of breaking this news right when I’d started choosing those flower girl dresses for the wedding.

To be honest, I’m still wrapping my head around it all because it happened rather quickly.

You see, as late as the beginning of June, I still thought we were going to be leaving Shanghai in early July amidst a whirlwind of awesome, cocktail-enhanced going away parties, followed up with a mad summer of visiting friends and family in Canada and the UK (craft ales! Pimms! sushi! eggs benedict!), then culminating in a freaking amazing road trip down the west coast of the US, via Burning Man, ending up in Mexico for a few months where we were going to settle down somewhere gorgeous for a few months to write amazing things and eat a ton of tacos and be in the right place for the Day of the Dead festivities (Oaxaca was fabulous for that back in 2008).

Then, in mid-June, I found out I was 4 weeks pregnant. Which was wonderful. It was a surprise but not unplanned, if that makes any sense.

It did mean, however, that my participation in that whirlwind of going away parties was now slightly altered. Slightly green around the gills and ridiculously exhausted, I drank my bodyweight in club soda and juice and made merry as best as I could before falling asleep by ten. The oddest part of all was not being able to tell anyone why I, of all people, was suddenly demurely sipping juice and turning down offers of wine and sushi and coffee. Totally out of character and many in Shanghai were left scratching their heads in bewilderment.

Then, just before we left Shanghai at the beginning of July, the man I just married tricked me into going up the Bottle Opener, ostensibly to have one last look at the panorama of Pudong and Puxi from half a kilometer up. Instead, he proposed and I said yes.

Although we had a baby baking away in my own personal little toaster oven, we hadn’t considered altering our travel plans. I knew enough women who had given birth whilst travelling, from Mexico to Turkey to China, to know that it wasn’t an impossible scenario. We also hadn’t given’t much thought to when or where we’d get married. We didn’t feel any sense of urgency. The engagement and baby were a good enough start. The formalities could wait.

Then we started thinking about the logistics.

Stupid logistics.

Things like, where could we both legally live if I couldn’t work for a while and so couldn’t rely on my usual work visa for a long term residence permit?

And where could we live where we could survive on just one salary and still get good access to affordable and decent health care? I’d spent enough time in public Turkish hospitals to know I didn’t fancy waiting on a hard, crowded bench opposite the morgue for five hours waiting for an ultrasound (been there, done that).

And how isolated would I be if heavily pregnant or newly post-partum and nowhere near friends and family in a place where I barely spoke the language?

And did I really want to have  to try to find my way around yet another medical system in yet another language in a very vulnerable time?

Stupid logistics.

Staying in Canada was out of the question, for a multitude of reasons, mostly legal (I’ve been away so long that I’m officially a non resident, making it impossible to sponsor anyone, regardless of marital status. Also, as a non-resident, I’m no longer covered under the government medical plan) but partially emotional (I get cranky and restless when here too long).

So we thought about the UK, his homeland and my old stomping ground back in the ’90s. 

I still had good friends there, even though I hadn’t lived there since the end of 1999 or even visited since 2003- surprisingly more than I still had back in Canada, where I grew up. That was a plus. And the man could, of course, work. And he had a vast collection of friends and family all over the country that we could turn to. And I could access decent, English language health care! If you’ve ever been in serious pain, muddy headed and in shock, in a hospital where they’re talking at you in very complex medical terminology that makes no sense due to your relatively limited proficiency combined with muddled state of mind, you’ll appreciate this.

So, some time in mid-July whilst visiting my family in Canada, we decided we ought to try for a UK visa. We could, like, head over there after the epic road trip, after the ambitious Mexican writerly retreat. We could go over on, say, a fiancee visa. We could apply from wherever we ended up in Mexico and leisurely make our way back to the UK. Maybe in November, before I’m too pregnant to fly. How hard could it be?

Silly me.

Without boring you all with bureaucratic details, let me summarize things thusly: If you haven’t been shacked up solidly for at least two years with bills and bank accounts in both names, you can’t apply as a non-married partner. You also can’t apply from a country where you aren’t resident (as in, not on a tourist visa, as we would be in Mexico). Also, it takes between two and twelve weeks to process and they keep your passport the whole time. Also, the sponsoring partner needs to have proof of a job (or job offer) in the UK earning at least 18.6K sterling per year as well as proof of access to acceptable accommodation.

So we decided to make things a bit easier and  get married in the UK whilst visiting his family in July and August, a simple registrar thing, then we’d kick off the application process as soon as we got back to Canada. If things went well, maybe we could still squeeze in a Mexican road trip. Maybe.

Do you know how to get married in the UK?

It’s quite a process. Not a difficult one, but one awkward enough when you only have 3 weeks in the country.

You need to call the local registrar to let them know you want to book an appointment to declare your intention to marry. Once you’ve booked that appointment, you go in and maybe sign some things that say, yo, I want to get hitched. Then you have to sit back and cool your heels for about 16 days. Then you can get married.

We tried to do that in Leicester, whilst visiting his family. However, we couldn’t even book an appointment to declare our intentions. Apparently getting married is a popular thing to do these days. They were all booked up until August. They suggested we try to register in Nottingham, which was relatively nearby.  Nottingham was slightly more feasible. As in, by their time frame, we could maybe squeeze in a quick wedding the morning before our afternoon flight out of Heathrow.

So we decided to get married in Canada.

Did you know that in BC, all you have to do is buy a marriage license (at London Drugs, of all places!), call up an officiant (all neatly listed online, with bios, photos and contact details, like a dating service) and do it. You can do it all in one day if you wanted to.

From rural Leicestershire, we booked our officiant (who, it turns out, went to school with my parents and who still remembered my dad’s childhood dog and street address from 1960 or so), google-found a photographer who gave us the discount rate (officially the Elopement rate) for our minimalist wedding, and went hunting for wedding clothes in the Indian street in Leicester.

We got the rings in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham, whilst visiting one of his friends from university. Titanium! Made from fighter planes and rocket ships!

The wedding would be small, a slightly elaborated elopement that included my parents (as witnesses), the officiant, the photographer and, well, us. On a big hill in a wild, leafy, wind swept park overlooking the San Juan islands. The reception would be a few weeks later, in a funky Italian wood-fired pizza restaurant where they’d take care of all the food and furniture and whatnot.

The whole thing was booked and sorted by the time we left the UK a few weeks later.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Unfortunately, this left me no time to indulge in a year of making Bridezilla photo montages, adding fire breathing giant lizards to my usual repertoire of laser cats.

Sorry guys.