Let’s go back to the disaster that was my wedding. Have you ever felt like all the blood has been drained from your body? Well, I certainly did many times during that awful period of my life.
As I was paying for my wedding (no one in my family had any money due to reasons previously cited) I used all my student loans and credit cards plus the little savings I had and had just managed to pay off all of the expenses. Our flight was an indirect flight and we had to spend one night as an extended stopover in another city before catching a domestic flight the next morning. The Ogre had arranged that we would spend one night with his close friend who would pick us up from the airport and then fly to the city where my wedding was taking place. That is all it was. One single night.
The friend was lovely. He looked after my family and took us to dinner and booked us into a hotel for a night. The next day, he dropped us to the airport and I was very grateful.
At the wedding and throughout that time, my father was a nightmare. He always is but he was the worst he has ever been. He stood outside the venue sulking and refusing to participate and the guests who had come on my side (only about ten due to the wedding being abroad) were trying to pacify him. So, when the women were singing and dancing and asking for the ‘bride’s mum to dance’, there was no bride’s mum in the hall. The only person present was my lovely little sister who danced and sang and desperately tried to make the day as positive as her 14 year old self could.
There is a cultural tradition that when it is time for the bride to be ‘given away’, everyone watches her walk out with her husband and his family and we all cry, as she is officially leaving her parents’ home. My sister went out to get my parents but they never came. So, there was no one from my family watching my departure.
Anyway, put that to one side, we returned to the UK, and about six weeks later, my ex-husband got an email from his friend back home, who had picked me up. Apparently, in that one night, my father had told him a sob story about how he didn’t have the money to pay for his daughter’s wedding, knowing perfectly well that he wasn’t paying anyway, and had taken 6000 pounds from the friend’s family, saying he would pay him back within a month. My husband, stunned, came and told me, and I looked at him, white as a sheet.
I found the money and paid him back instantly, of course.
But the shame never left me.
Who Fucked Me? 