the one with wynnona judd

In 1999, I went back to Nashville for my senior year of college.  I'd broken up with my first real-deal boyfriend before summer vacation and was coming back to school single for the first time in a long time.  

At the very best, that was a tumultuous time with my family.  My dad had remarried someone whom I emphatically disliked.  They'd moved in together with her three boys after I went to college, and the five of them became a family in my absence.   My mom had married a former high school boyfriend (husband #4) and run off to San Antonio.  And my dad's ex-wife (married to him from the time I was three to seventeen) was preparing to marry again. Pictures that I had grown up with, the tiniest of traditions or customs that we actually held, and any familiarity of what "going home" meant vanished as each of my parents stepped into this latest version of his or her life.  While I wish I could say that I took this all in stride, a horrible cycle of feeling rejected then acting distant then feeling more rejected had developed.  If my parents had all chosen a partner and created a new life, I was determined to do the same. 

I met and started dating Ricky.  He managed a local bar I'd started visiting...the one where I drank too many bottles of wine with my friends or wrote the occasional paper over a cocktail at the bar. It was by all accounts the wrong situation; we had different goals, different dreams, and different ways of looking at the world.  He said things -- about his financial situation and unpaid bills, his time as a Green Beret, his past in general -- that just didn't add up.  But he gave me attention and loved me and told me that it would going to be okay, all at a time when I wasn’t getting that from my family and couldn't hear it from my friends and didn’t have the capacity to give it to myself.  

The summer after graduation I moved to Connecticut and started working in New York, while Ricky stayed in Nashville.  We talked and texted everyday and I made several trips to Nashville. That November he visited me in Connecticut for the first time, and we made plans to go to a Wynonna Judd concert at the Mohegan Sun casino. In fact, the the trip was orchestrated around her show. His best friend was her lawyer, and I had spent several nights my senior year of college playing poker with the Judds instead of partying at the same-old frat party. We had amazing seats at the concert, and near the halfway point she called him up to the stage…where he proposed.

For those who wonder why I said yes...there were four thousand people watching and what felt like as many spotlights shining directly on me.  I was pulled up on stage and she sang a song to us and for the evening (and with as many glasses of wine I'd had at that point), it was all sort of fun.  I woke up the next morning with the ultimate  "how the actual fuck did this happen" hangover, a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach and a resolve that this was my chance to be loved.  And then he flew away the next day and I could immediately shove any wedding-related magazine or congratulations card to the very, very back of my closet.  This was long before I learned to deal with things head-on; I was deep in the "let's pretend this is fine" haze.  

For several months I wore the ring without ever thinking about what getting married would actually entail.  This was easy...I was working my ass off in New York and he lived far, far away.   But eventually he began pressuring me to quit my consulting job and move back to Nashville; he was eager for us to buy a house together and start our life.  The house was the last straw...Ricky had terrible credit, and had wanted to do the whole thing in my name.  I’d grown up believing marriage to be temporary...but the prospect of a thirty-year mortgage was an actual commitment. Six months after the engagement I flew to Nashville, broke up with Ricky in person, and flew home in the same day.  

This is the first and only time I’ve been proposed to. I’ve often thought back on that time and while I can’t believe I let it go that far, I totally understand how it did, and what he gave me that I wasn’t getting from anyone else. Aside from the age difference and the bad credit and the wildly opposing political views and his love of guns and extreme messiness and fabrications about his past there was one other thing…his last name was Pigg.  It's not why I ended it, but--and no disrespect--it wasn't a name I ever wanted to have and that had been a point of tension.  And so now...nearly 20 years later and still single...at least I can remind myself that I'm not Mrs. Pigg.