The ring story

A good friend Emmy, blogged about marriage the other day and it made me think about the story of my ring.  You see I have a sapphire as my engagement ring's main stone, paired with small wedding band.  It wasn't always that way though.  Like a lot of American ladies, my first engagement ring was a diamond, a princess cut diamond that my now husband picked out in a lovely setting.  To say I wasn't someone who had thought about what she wanted as a token of her future husband's love would be a lie. I did think about it.  I had witnessed so many girlfriends get engaged and married in the few years before my engagement that I had checked out the websites where you could build your ideal ring a few times.  At least to know that I wanted a princess cut diamond in a non-solitaire setting.  I also thought it would be cool to have something blue, but well, Keith would have to had been a millionaire to appease that last request and be a diamond too.
So with those characteristics in mind, my now husband picked out a ring for me. And it was beautiful. It felt classic and I like classic. When we were married, I had my wedding band fused to it so that I wouldn't be constantly turning around the two rings to match.  I blamed it on my large knuckles, but otherwise thin fingers for my rings, so anyway, I thought it might help. It did.
Fast forward a little over 2 years, I was pregnant with the baby who turned out to be Ben. My husband told me a horror story about his mother having to have her ring cut off her finger due to swelling when she was pregnant with his youngest brother.  It was enough to influence me to not wear my rings on my finger, so I thought that a heavier chain would keep my rings near me but not run into issues like what my MIL had. After all, I liked these rings, because my husband had picked it out for me, and that meant a lot. The chain worked for while.
One day when I was on my way to the lab, I took the city train, the Rapid as the Clevelanders call it.  I got up to leave and heard something like a coin fall, but didn't think anything of it. I exited the train and made my half mile walk to my lab.
At the lab, I looked down and noticed that the chain I was wearing was caught in between my two shirts but there were no rings. They were gone. I pretty much crumbled in that exact moment. At the time, I had no idea where I had lost the rings and pregnant me was an emotional mess. I think in the mess I called my husband and he said to file a police report and so I went to the campus station and did so. However, at some point I realized that coin dropping sound on the train was the ring falling. My rings were gone.

A good friend and I went retraced my steps and checked out the station where I had gotten off the train to check if I had lost the rings on the tracks or in the station. It wasn't found.  A flyer was made and my husband, the same good friend and I spent a lot of time taking the train and posting the flyers around the stations along the train line. We got a whole one call from a passenger who had said a lady had found a ring on the train, but he didn't know her but said she was looking at pawning it.  We were told if that did happen, with the police report filed with all the diamond info, we would have been informed if they found it. They didn't.

For a while after I lost the ring, I wore cheap Claire's kid jewelry rings on my ring finger. It some how made me feel better, but I wasI still really sad that I had lost something that meant a lot to me. On my first mother's day, my husband presented me with a new wedding band. The exact same one that I had before.  It was super sweet and I was excited to have that reminder of that life long promise I made to him on our wedding day.

Come December, Keith took Ben out for a little excursion. I believe I was finishing up preparing for my PhD final defense. He came back with an engagement ring of the same setting, except this time with a sapphire in it, because after all, I had always wanted something blue anyway.  And you know what, I loved it from the moment I put it on and still do.  Sometimes people think its an odd choice for a ring, but eh, it has history to it and well, I like it. 

So I guess the root of it is, not that I had to get this ring or that, but ultimately that this guy I loved and was learning to love more and more each day wanted to show me that he loved me too, and this was one of those ways of doing it.  I don't think a perfect ring has to be a way a husband shows his love for his wife, or fiancé for fiancé, but for me I could and can see his love for me in many different ways.  The way he wanted to get something just right for me in the beginning, the hours spent signing and resigning the train corridors and the picking out a replacement ring set so I could have that reminder of his love everyday.  And that is the ring story.