Free Milk

I'm always reading about creative marriage proposals. You know what I mean, the skywriting, the billboard, the guy on a white horse. I didn't get any of those but it doesn't make the moment any less special to me.

Rob and I had been living together for about a year and we hadn't talked about the M word at all. Both of us had been married before and had a bit of "baggage" left over from that. Emotional Baggage. I had also come with a ready made family of a toddler and a pre-teen but I think Rob was very attracted to my having kids, he was so good to and with them. So we were just coasting along, shacking up but no long term plans.

This was starting to bother me. I knew I wanted to marry him when he came over to my house after we had been dating a few months and he found me struggling to clean my house gutters. I don't do ladders so I am on the 2nd step of the ladders, stretching up with a trowel, trying to dig the gunk out. He immediately climbs onto my roof with the hose and trowel and cleans off the roof and cleans out the gutters and down spouts. I was in love. No one had ever offered to clean my gutters before. I asked him to move in that day.

When I was young, my mother always warned us not to cheapen ourselves. That we should hold out for marriage. That the farmer won't buy the cow if you give the milk away for free. I was starting to feel after a year of living together that I was that cow. I wasn't unhappy, in fact I had never been happier in my whole life. But I was thinking it was time to tie the knot. Especially as we had been talking about extending that milk production by making a baby together. So I went off the pill.

I was now officially trying to have a baby and I was happy about that but I was grumbling to anyone who would listen (except Rob, of course) about the milk/cow issue. On one particularly sunny July day, I made dinner rather moodily, cleaned up and was sitting at the table reading a magazine, muttering to myself. Rob comes over to me and kneels down next to me. I'm thinking, great, what does he want? He's going to try and cheer me up with his Mr. Nice Guy humor. So I look over at him and he mumbles something at me. I instantly think he said," Will you marry me?" I shout "YES!" Then it hits me, maybe he didn't say that, maybe I just agreed to something else. He did kind of mumble. But I realized that Brianne who was on the phone with a friend is screaming into the phone, "Robert just asked my mom to marry him!" Yeah! I was going to become a happy cow!! No more free milk!