Lost and Found or One Wedding, Two Wedding Rings

If diamonds are a girl's best friend, then I suppose that you could say that I have misplaced my best friend.  More specifically, my wedding ring.  I have mentioned the fact that I am the owner of two wedding rings here before, and thanks to Mama Kat's great prompts for Writer's Workshop, I finally have a good excuse to explain why.  Click the button below to go to Mama Kat's blog to view all the prompts, and to read other blog posts!

My husband and I have been married since 1997.  In fact, our anniversary is on Monday.  I am "celebrating" by working all afternoon and evening.  (Thrilling.) Then, he will be taking the kids camping.  (I don't "do" camping.)  Anniversary? What anniversary? Anyhow, I'm getting off track here.  I've loved my wedding ring since the first time I saw it-it's just totally "me".  It's not too flashy, but it's pretty, and I love the style of it.  That creepy looking picture is actually my hand and original ring.  I sort of like my hands, but that picture just kind of freaks me out.  My stellar cell phone photography "skillz" don't do my poor, decapitated looking hand any favors there...

A few years ago, I realized that my wedding ring was missing.  At first, I wasn't too worried.  I would frequently remove my rings, watch and bracelets at night, and just leave them sitting somewhere-on the end table, the night stand, the kitchen counter, etc.  My husband was always bringing my ring to me, telling me that I'd better put it on before it got lost.  So this time, I figured it would turn up eventually.  After a few days passed, my ring never was found.  I proceeded to tear the house apart looking for it.  Well, my kids were both small then, so the house was pretty much torn apart already!  I searched every flat surface in the house, felt around in drawers, looked under every piece of furniture, and even had my husband bring in the trash from the garage to look through.  My worst fear was that I had laid the ring on a pile of newspapers that got picked up and thrown away.  When it was still not found, we searched in the crevices of the couch, chair and loveseat.  No luck.  I convinced my husband to cut the cloth on the underside of the furniture, in case it had fallen down inside somehow.  We never found it.  I was heartsick.

Naturally, I started trying to convince him that I needed a new ring.  A girl needs a little sparkle on her hand, right? For a long time, he balked at the idea.  With my brother in law's help, we finally convinced him that I should have a new one.  I think it was the whole "you don't want other men hitting on your wife because they don't know she's married" thing that did it.  Not that that actually ever happened, but still... 

So, one day, I settled in front of the Zales website and searched for a new best friend.  Instead of being excited, I was actually a little sad.  I really didn't want a new ring, I wanted "my" ring.  Ring styles had changed quite a bit since 1997, so it was hard to find a similar ring, but I finally settled on a replacement.  When it arrived in the mail, I rushed to put it on.  It was bigger and flashier than my old friend, but still not too showy.  My husband (playfully?) warned me that I'd better not lose this one or I would be out of luck, as we'd be paying for this ring for a while. We'd gotten a Zales credit card just for this purchase.

A couple of days after getting the new ring sized, and showing my new bling off to work friends and family, I was sitting on the couch pinning up a pair of my daughter's pants.  She's always been a skinny little thing, so I keep a coffee cup full of safety pins to pin up the waist of her pants when needed.  I was poking around in the cup, when I noticed something metal that was not silver, like the pins.   An odd mixture of surprise, joy, guilt and chagrin filled me as I pulled the object out of the cup. It was my ring! My old ring!

"I found it!" I yelled excitedly.
"You found your ring, didn't you?", said my husband, his excitement level not exactly reaching mine.  "I knew that would happen as soon as we bought you a new one." Bethany's Law.
"But look!! It's my old ring! I missed it!", I replied, thrilled to see my old friend again.  She was not as sparkly as her new counterpart, and was much more modest, but she belonged on my finger.

A couple of years later, I'm much more careful with my ring.  I rarely take it of at all now.  Lately, I can hardly even get it off my finger-I'm not exactly the same size I was in 1997... I do wear the new ring on occasion-on my right hand, which I feel a little silly about, since it's obviously a wedding ring, but since we're still making payments on it, I figure I'd better wear it.

A lot of things end up lost around here, DS games, actual DS's themselves, socks, library books, etc., but the wedding ring is the most memorable of the "lost" item stories.  I'm often asked to explain why I have two wedding rings, and I endure some good natured teasing from family members and coworkers, but it's worth it to have my old friend back where she belongs.  On my sallow, puffy, wrinkled, decapitated hand.