I was eighteen years old, trying to believe love could make everything work. On a night that should have marked the beginning of something beautiful, words from the person I was about to build my life with left me feeling shattered and alone.
🤎
🤎
An 18-year-old bride sits alone in grief on the night before her wedding. A Spirit Flow Prophetic Art illustration by Pam Herrick reflecting heartbreak, emotional pain and a moment that should have been filled with joy.
We set the wedding date for July 18th—exactly one year to the day from when we first met at the bar on my Mom’s birthday. I had just turned 18.
But my father was furious. He wouldn’t walk me down the aisle. In fact, he wouldn’t even talk to me for a whole year after I got pregnant. It deeply hurt my feelings that the one thing in the world that meant the absolute most to me—becoming a mother—was considered something bad by him. He acted like I was throwing my life away. He said the exact same thing, actually. But to me, I was doing the most honorable thing in the world, and the thing that meant the most to me. It is still the most important thing to me, and I don’t regret my choices at all.
However, I started seeing things that made me start to think maybe I didn’t want to get married—things in him because of the drinking, and because of the lifestyle, because of everything that I had already decided I didn’t want anything to do with. All of a sudden, I was right smack in the middle of it again with the person that I was going to be building my life with, and I was already pregnant.
I was fighting for my family. I was fighting for what I knew was going to be a good family. I was going to make it a good family. I just didn’t have a partner that felt strongly that way; even though he did say he wanted a life like that and I believed him but he was more concerned with drinking and partying, and I was more concerned with helping him be good.
And the worst night of my life, up until that time, was the night before my wedding, of all things. He had gone uptown and he got drunk. We were in North Carolina, my hometown—not Virginia, and not his hometown in Pennsylvania—so he knew no one there. I was at my Grandma Betty Ball’s house, and he comes home drunk. He had run into some people uptown and came to the conclusion that I slept around, which I didn’t.
I know from way back when I was a teenager, there were people that started rumors, and guys would get upset because I wouldn’t do anything with them because someone said that I had. It’s a long story, but I had one of my friends at school one time that said the teacher said something about me being loose, and he said, “Are you kidding me? You can’t touch her with a 10-foot pole.” But people had started the stories.
And so instead of the man I was about to marry taking up for my honor, he comes home and calls me a whore. He didn’t just call me that, he hollered it at me repeatedly and I was trying to get him to be quiet so he didn’t wake up my grandmother. And I had to tell him through sobbing tears I was not.
He wasn’t my husband yet, and anyway, it was devastating. It was crushing. I can’t even explain the weight of how much that hurt on a night like that—the night before I’m getting married, when it’s supposed to be a special thing, and he’s calling me a whore. I was so empty. I already had everybody there coming, and I felt like I couldn’t call it off. It was a mess. It hurt deeply. It still hurts deeply.
If you are reading this, and it’s already bad… you don’t have to go through with it.
🤎
EXPLORE MORE ART AND STORIES
About Pam Herrick
The Girl Who Chased Horses
Gallery
RSS Feed
