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

Your kid isn’t welcome; deal with it

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 organize a child-free wedding.

Organizing a wedding is stressful. Organizing a wedding when deep down in your heart you don’t want to get married is even more stressful. My ex and I had a lot of heated debates about what was supposed to be the best day of our lives.

One thing we quickly agreed upon, though, was having a child-free wedding. After looking up the costs of lemonade stands, bouncy houses, and entertainment for children, we decided we didn’t want to accommodate our nieces, nephews, godchildren, and freshly brewed offspring of the people closest to us.

The ceremony would be late afternoon, followed by a party. We didn’t want people to leave early due to sleepy children. I didn’t want to deal with kids running around during speeches, grabby hands in wedding cakes, screaming matches, or falling champagne glasses.