E-Mail This Article to a Friend Been there, done that I’m getting married in May, when the 180-day waiting period imposed by the state’s high court on same-sex marriages ends. But I won’t be having a wedding. BY SUSAN RYAN-VOLLMAR

LAST WEDNESDAY, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court basically told the state legislature marriage or bust, I got a phone call from my mother. She wanted to know if there was any way I could put off giving birth to my second child with my partner, Linda, until after we were legally married: "That way you won’t have to pay for Linda to adopt the baby. She’ll automatically be a legal parent, right?"

I am due on May 16. The 180-day waiting period set by the SJC before marriage licenses can be issued to same-sex couples ends May 17. I told my mother (who is a financial planner) that I really had no control over when number two would be born. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that my mother has been the only person to react to the possibility of Linda’s and my getting legally married this way. Everyone else wants to know if we’ve set a date.

We haven’t. Nor will we. We’ll just be getting hitched — shotgun-wedding style — as soon as possible after the baby is born. Why? Because Linda and I had a commitment ceremony 10 years ago this August, and there’s no way we’re going through that again. Not even for wedding gifts (which we could use, by the way, since we recently bought a house and spent so much money renovating the kitchen and bathroom that we have nothing left over for furnishings).

SHORTLY AFTER we moved in together, during the summer of 1993 — which was a good 10 years after we’d met and fallen in love during our freshman year of college — I began badgering Linda to have a commitment ceremony. My motivations weren’t exactly romantic — hence, the fact that I was badgering her as opposed to proposing. I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I saw a commitment ceremony as some kind of line in the sand for every member of our family: attend and accept us fully — or else. Linda pretty much ignored me and refused to talk about having any sort of ceremony to mark our commitment to one another. Then one day she surprised me by proposing marriage. Stunned, I accepted.

And then all hell broke loose.

I needn’t have worried about challenging our Catholic families to demonstrate their support for our relationship. Both branches enthusiastically embraced the idea of a commitment ceremony, or, as everyone else called it, a wedding. Our mothers, though, embraced the idea a bit too enthusiastically. In short, they hijacked our day. Which is, of course, what mothers of brides do. But in most weddings, you’re only talking about one such mother, not two.

We had to plan the date around my mother’s extensive late-summer triathlon schedule. Linda’s mother gave us a list of her friends she wanted invited, including a few we knew to be less than open to the idea of same-sex relationships. My mother insisted on hosting a pre-ceremony party. Linda’s mother insisted on doing the same for a day-after-the-ceremony party.

But the worst moment came during a meeting with the event planner for Jay Peak ski resort, which is where we decided to have our ceremony. For reasons that were never entirely clear to me — maybe it’s because she was helping to pay for the event — my mother insisted on coming to the meeting. We’d already had several conversations with the event planner and were sitting down simply to finalize everything. The meeting took place over February vacation, when Linda and I were staying with my mother at her cabin in Vermont. My mother took a break from the slopes to join us. She was wearing a ski suit and ski boots and chewed on the ear of her sunglasses, which hung out of her mouth, as she listened to us go over the details. The meeting went smoothly: the ceremony would take place at the top of the mountain on a deck you could reach only by taking a tram. We would have appetizers and wine on the deck immediately afterward. A buffet dinner would be served in the lodge below. As we wrapped things up, my mother slapped her hand down on the table and spoke her first words (aside from "hello") to the event planner: "Now, there aren’t going to be any problems because this is a gay wedding, are there?"

Linda and I were speechless. As was the event planner, who took a few moments to recover before saying that there wouldn’t be. "Good," my mother replied. And then she wrote out a check. My only thought was to be grateful that Linda’s mother didn’t ski. Otherwise she would have been there, too. And God knows what she would have said. (All you need to know to confirm my fears is this: it took Linda’s mother a few months to get comfortable with Linda’s and my relationship after Linda came out to her. But then Linda’s mother started attending PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) meetings. Before Linda had a chance to come out to all her friends, her mother had founded a PFLAG chapter on the North Shore. For a good year or so, she was more out than Linda was.)

IF IT’S BAD to have two mothers of the brides, it’s twice as bad to have two brides. Think Bridezilla meets King Kong multiplied by the Fab Five from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. We both had strong opinions about place settings, flowers, decorations, invitations, what to wear, what our guests should wear, the menu, the cake, cake decorations, guest list, and whether or not our five-year-old yellow Lab, Hocus, should be the ring bearer.

After weeks of piddly arguments (Linda: "I think we should have carrot cake." Me: "I think we should have chocolate") and a few moments of high drama (either one of us — at various moments during the planning stage — voiced at high pitch and volume: "Whose idea was this anyway? I don’t want to do this"), we finally settled most of our differences by divvying up the responsibilities according to our abilities. Linda took on all the tasks that required close attention to detail — in short, just about everything. I was left to get the invitations out, write the ceremony, and hold the line on Linda’s idea of stringing the rings around Hocus’s neck and having Hocus deliver them to us during the ceremony.

For the most part this worked. Though we hit a few glitches. Some highlights:

• I procrastinated getting the invitations done because I had an elaborate design idea that required help from my sister (an artist). I wasted so much time talking about what I was going to do that I never actually got around to doing it. So Linda — who cannot spell — went to a printer herself. She dropped off her scribbled sample of what the invitations should say and ordered them without a proof because the invites had to get in the mail ASAP. And so — to my horror, but not necessarily to Linda’s (have I mentioned that she can’t spell?) — we invited about 100 people to a committment, as opposed to a commitment, ceremony.

• Linda, with heavy input from our mothers, decided that Vermont wildflowers should be the main decorative element on the deck at the top of the mountain. Again, with heavy input from our mothers, it was decided that this would be a great job for our siblings to take care of. So on the morning of our ceremony (which was taking place at 3 p.m.) a motley assortment of slightly hung-over siblings and siblings-in-law piled into my sister’s VW Cabriolet with a bucket and cutting shears to collect flowers. Linda had one simple instruction: nothing yellow. Apparently, however, the only flowers to be found growing road- and hillside in Vermont in August are yellow.

What began as a fun group activity became — as the morning turned into early afternoon — a frantic, sweaty search. My sister gunned her little car up and down the byways of the Northeast Kingdom while her passengers desperately scanned the roadside fields for something — anything — that wasn’t yellow. With time ticking away, they finally agreed to go with yellow flowers and gathered a giant bucketful. As they were driving back home, the bucket holder — one of our tall, strapping brothers — suddenly noticed that all the flowers were crawling with bugs. He freaked out and tossed the flowers and the bucket out of the car. A quick decision had to be made: continue the search or continue home sans flowers? With no bucket to collect any flowers they still might find, they drove home. On their way back, they passed a roadside stand. Flowers were for sale. Everyone jumped out of the car. They bought up all the flowers — only one variety was available — and asked the woman selling them to head into her back yard to cut more. This is how — to both Linda’s and my horror — we ended up with orange gladiolas (yes, the funeral flower) decorating our little deck at the top of the mountain.

• Linda and I stayed at the hotel at the ski resort before the ceremony. But we couldn’t have Hocus with us. So she stayed with my family at my mother’s cabin. My mother was charged with the task of getting Hocus to the mountain. In the mad rush that ensued at my mother’s house when everyone showed up hours late from the flower-gathering expedition — with a gigantic bunch of orange gladiolas, no less — Hocus took refuge under a bed. (We have been told that a lot of yelling and swearing occurred as five people, including my then-82-year-old grandfather, fought to use the one bathroom and shower stall at the same time.) In the end, Hocus never emerged from under the bed, which put her out of sight and, well, out of mind. My mother forgot to bring her. And so — to Linda’s horror, though not necessarily to mine (did I mention that I wanted my sister and not Hocus to give us our rings?) — Hocus missed our commitment ceremony.

THERE’S SOMETHING to be said for standing up in front of 100 of your closest friends and family members and declaring your love for your partner. There’s something to be said for doing so when nearly everyone present is well aware of the difficulties you overcame to get to that moment (such as coming out in the mid 1980s with Boy George as the predominant public model of all things gay). But there’s also something to be said for doing it only once.

So yes, Linda and I will be getting married this spring. Primarily to offer each other as well as our children the security that comes with having every member of the family related to each other legally as well as spiritually. (Not to mention the money we’ll save by having everyone on the same health plan.) But another wedding? We don’t think so.

Susan Ryan-Vollmar can be reached at svollmar[a]phx.com