She Tried To Kill Me On Our Honeymoon
The scars still ache.
Blood poured across my chest, pooling across my lap as the knife shuddered in my shoulder.
I tried not to scream, but it’s hard not to when you’ve just been stabbed by a crazed person who, merely hours before, made you the happiest person on earth.
Welcome to the beginning of my first marriage.
The wedding was beautiful. Her parents went all out to make sure their daughter had everything she wanted. I took a back seat to a lot of the planning, which everyone was okay with.
Especially me.
I never wanted it to begin with.
See, the trouble is, the marriage wasn’t something I really wanted. I hadn’t planned for the events of my life to go the way they did, and found myself wholly inadequate to the occasion.
We discovered she was pregnant just a few months before the wedding.
Both of us were young. I, especially, was nowhere near mature enough to handle being married, much less a father. I was still dealing with the tumultuous ordeal of emotions my own abusive father left me with, and I could not fathom how I would be adequate for a kid.
Slinging pizzas for a living didn’t seem the right way to go with an infant on the way. How would I manage being able to afford the birth? I didn’t have insurance, and neither did she.
Diapers? Oh god, those things are expensive. Formula? Toys? Rent? How the hell was I supposed to do all of this?
The only reason I asked her to marry me was because I thought, at the time, it was the “right thing to do.” I was raised in a hyper-religious cult of a family. Having a child out of wedlock? I may as well have lit the bonfires of hell myself.
No. The last thing I wanted to do was get married, especially under those circumstances. I didn’t feel I had any choice in the matter, though, and if it made her and everyone else happy, I would not argue.
Marrying at 19 is tough enough. Tying the knot with what is tantamount to a shotgun in the face is even harder.
I grew to understand she had some mental health issues in the time we were together. I didn’t comprehend how bad they could get, though, until after the ceremony was over and we were finally investing time alone.
We originally planned to spend time at a hotel, tool around for a couple of days in the wilds of Michigan, and then head back to the place we chose as our first house together. Even that wasn’t ready yet. We thought we’d take care of it after we settled into our new lives.
Mistake one.
Mistake two was not realizing how fragile her mental state was turning as the wedding day wore on.
We made it to the hotel that first night, spent a little time together relaxing with some random show on the boob-tube, and went to sleep.
My body jolted awake as her scream echoed through the room and I sat bolt-upright. I shook my head in the darkness, trying to pick out what was happening.
The bathroom door flew wide, the light piercing through the veil of black. Her body crashed through, another loud screech resounding.
She slammed into me, toppling me onto my back as her weight pressed hard on my chest. One more wail and the piercing agony ripped through my shoulder and chest.
I threw her off of me, and she stumbled backward, her arms flailing as she ran back into the bathroom and slammed the door.
“You won’t hurt her! You won’t get to her!” Her words were loud but muffled by the wood.
I didn’t want to sob, but I had never felt a pain like that before. Heat, sweat, and blood poured from me as I reached to feel the knife jutting from my right shoulder.
I touched it, gasping for air as tears streamed down my cheeks. What the hell was happening? What the hell was wrong with her?
The ambulance arrived a little while later. I didn’t know what else to do. She was locked in the bathroom, and I was not going to be able to drive myself to a hospital to get the damn knife out of my chest.
She was still muttering incoherently when they took me in.
She spent the first few weeks of our marriage in a mental facility while they tried to figure out what went wrong. I did my best to console myself and wonder what in the world I was supposed to do next.
I knew she had issues. I just didn’t realize how many until it was too late.
She had bipolar, with psychotic-neurotic tendencies. The stress of being pregnant and going through the wedding was too much for her. She finally broke on our honeymoon night.
She claimed I was her dead uncle, and that I had come back to life. Why? To turn her cousin into a fetus and put it inside of her. That way, when the child was born, I could take it away.
She was doing what she could to protect herself and the baby from me — her dead uncle.
The marriage fell to pieces soon after our daughter was born.
I know I could have done more. Perhaps I should have worked out more to save the marriage and move on from that kind of beginning. It would have made life for my daughter easier in some ways.
But I was far too young to understand how to handle it all. I was barely out of childhood, myself, and the one I had was a train wreck. I had no basis of comparison, and no support system in place to help me get through it.
Many people were there for her. I was alone and ostracized by friends and family for not doing more.
Maybe if the whole thing had taken place a few years later, it would have turned out different. I don’t know. I can’t play the “what-if” game with myself, and there’s no way to go back in time to do it over again.
It’s been thirty-two years and I still have the scar from that crazy night. Sometimes, out of nowhere, it will ache, and the memories of it all flood back in.
Those weird, random moments in the night can really take you places incomprehensible.
Thank you for being you.
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Keep striving to “be the best you that you can be” at this moment. Remember, no matter who you are or what you’re going through, you are worthy of being loved. Don’t let anyone teach you anything different.