Why Would You Insist on Taking Your Child to a Child-Free Wedding?

Your kid isn’t welcome; deal with it

Judith Victoria
4 min readAug 20, 2022
Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

And there it was, the question I dreaded so much.

“So, why did you cancel the wedding?”

Saying the truth out loud felt humiliating. Every time I had to say that my fiancé had been living a double life for five years, my heart tried to lunge out of my chest. So I just stammered something about infidelity without getting into specifics.

She shrugged. “I hope you guys work it out; many relationships have to deal with this. And maybe you can set a new date quickly; we were all looking forward to the big event. Especially considering it would be Noah’s first wedding.”

When she mentioned her seven-year-old son, I inadvertently frowned. “Uhm,” I creaked, “the invitation clearly said it was adults only.”

Suzanna smiled. “Oh yes, we saw that. But the three of us are a package deal. And you know how easy he is; you wouldn’t have noticed he was there. But it doesn’t matter since, well, there is no wedding.”

Because I had no idea how to react, I changed the subject. But I couldn’t let it go. On the drive home, all I could think about was how I would have reacted to a kid showing up at my wedding after all the effort it had taken to…

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Judith Victoria
Judith Victoria

Written by Judith Victoria

Essays on life, love, and other lousy stuff. Otherworldly flash fiction & romantic short stories. Failing forward. Perpetually amazed.

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