Chapter 6.

So I will skip over the fact that we had many, many, many discussions about what went down with him and this Jen girl.  We talked about it even more than it needed to be talked about.  I wanted out.  He begged.  I ended up letting him stay, or at least agreeing to it until the baby was born in a month or so.  So we went on.  And I felt like an idiot.  But I was busy getting ready for the princess.  She was overdue, I expected this, as I didn’t want to share her.  I gained 28 pounds by the time she was born, and about a week later, all of it was gone except for eight pounds…and that stayed until she was about a year old and stopped nursing.  I went into labor the day I was due to be induced.  Everything went well, and my eight pound, two ounce, 21 inch long baby diva arrived.  And she was gorgeous.  And by the way, that’s a big baby for someone my frame.  😉  I was then so busy with the munchkin and all that I didn’t really deal with the marriage.  Just trudged and plodded along.  He stayed home with her during the day, then I came home around 3 and the he went to work and I stayed alone with her until about 9 or 10 when he got home.  AND he kept playing in the band.  To save this marriage, he should have quit.  But I refused to ask him to.  I wasn’t going to be WHY that band fell apart…it had to be done on his own.  And it never was.  He offered…but never followed through.  So, for three years I endured and trudged through.  Baby went into the daycare at my work at a little over a year old and life went on as usual.  But I never felt the same.  I felt ill when I thought about it. And I had lost all respect and trust.  And periodically I’d get a phone call while I was home nursing the baby, that Jen had tried to talk to him at show or was chasing his car out of the parking lot.  And the major kicker…the week after this all went down and the big show-down, she sent letters and pictures to my work.  I went to the mail box, saw a huge yellow envelope with my name on it and knew…so I went and got a co-worker (the only one who knew really) and told her and she said “Let’s pray”.  Did I mention she’s born-again?  🙂  We prayed.  And I opened.  And there were all these huggy, drunk pictures of them and letters on scraps of paper…intimate letters.  And typewritten letters.  Those I wasn’t sure of the authenticity of, and still am not.  But what was definitely legit, was the pictures and the little notes about how he missed her and loved her.  And how he loved how she smelled.  It sounded like he didn’t even have a wife.  It sounded like what he’d write to ME!  Weird.  This all from the guy who came home and begged me to stay with him and professed his love and grovelled…huh?  Well, still pregnant then, I called my family, called the husband…reached him and met him on my way home.  It just was a mess.  

So needless to say, staying for 3 years was nice.  But dumb.  When I finally told him that was it, that I couldn’t force it anymore…people thought I was mean to leave.  They had forgotten.  Something that took away the joy of the only pregnancy, the only child, the only birth I will ever experience…had been forgotten.  Man people suck sometimes.  I was the bad one.  And still am in the eyes of his “band”.  And some of his family…the rest were understanding.  His Mom has been great to me…always…and very much so to my B.

But he moved out and I kept our house for three more years alone…and never really moved forward until I got out of that house.  Once I did, then I really left him behind. He still lies, all the time, and I still cover for him somewhat with his daughter.  I want her to believe in the father that he sometimes is-rather, than who he actually is.  

So more to come, I’ve got to finish up some lab stuff.  

Chapter 5.

So..I can hear parts of their conversation from the window where I’m sitting in B’s nursery.  She asks what’s going on and he tells her that he’s home, that he told her already this is where he belongs.  It goes on like that for about ten minutes and my father-in-law is on the phone coaching me to go outside.  Finally, I get the courage to do so (nowadays, I would have marched right out there and thrown rocks at her car and punched her in the face…I’m a much fiestier wife now).  I start walking down towards the car and they are ending their chat.  She drives off and he walks up the hill and says “Let’s go inside and talk”.  I say “No.  Have you been seeing that girl?  Who is she?  Is that where you’ve been all those times?”.  He just says a simple “yes”.  I take the very heavy cordless phone and chuck it at his head.  Hard.  He picks it up and follows me inside.  I cry and continue to ask him what kind of a jerk he is, and what did he take me for?  (Gee, I don’t know, the naive idiot that I actually was?).  It goes on for a bit.  His Dad tells us to come up to his house (he called back, the phone is still operable apparently).  We go to his parents, I go inside and cry and he stays outside with his father, who dragged him out of the car and is seriously ripping into him.  Somehow it all winds down, we go home and I tell him that I’m going to his show tonight.  I want to see this girl in person.  Will she be there?  BsDaddy is a musician in a popular area band.  Hence how he met Jen.  She was a groupie who followed him around for awhile.  One day, according to him, he was in line at a local grocery store and she was behind him in line (a set up, she worked at the bank in the aforementioned grocery store)  and struck up a conversation.  He says that he’s had better days.  She says something about maybe he should swing by sometime and talk about it.  And there it begins.  They actually sat near each other at a local restaurant before a show.  People KNEW.  Friends knew.  Worst of all, some family and the band members I considered like family (and their wives), yeah they knew.  They all chose to stay out of it.  I mean seriously, that pregnant wife living in the middle of nowhere, she must have done SOMETHING to deserve it.  Right?  I kid you not, a few people said their husbands told them to stay out of it, because maybe I wasn’t as nice as everyone thought.  

Back to topic.  Headed to the outdoor restaurant/bar to stand on the back deck where the hubby was playing.  He came out during breaks and leaned on me, kissing me.  Told me when Jen showed up.  I walked up behind her and her group of friends and made some very nasty comments something like “THIS is her???  Seriously, couldn’t you have chosen better if you were going to jeopardize our marriage?  Honey, she’s bigger than me and I’m 8 months pregnant!”.  I know, catty.  But I wasn’t thinking straight.  And I wanted that little homewrecker to HURT.  I wasn’t yet mad enough at BsDaddy.  Just wait, that will come.

Eventually, we were standing, surrounded by about 20 friends on the back deck and she walks by.  I’m leaning against a rail, he’s leaning against me, his back to the little walkway.  She prances by and tickles his side.  For real.  I kid you not.  Now that was some serious courage.  Now here comes the part I remember really, really well.  I said “Get your hands off my husband you dirty whore”.  She turns around.  “What did you say to me?  BsDaddy, did you hear that?”.  (He’s just standing there stunned).  “I think you heard me.  Get away from us right now”.  She grins “He loves me.  He wants to be with ME.  Tell her where you were last night, tell her”.  I stare hard into her face.  “If he wants to go with you, he’s free to go at any time.  Do you want to go BsDaddy?  I can get a ride home just fine.  All our friends are here anyway.”.  He says “No, seriously.  I love you.  I’m going home with you.”.  She says “WHAT?  Why are you saying that now?  He’s only with you because of this” and on “this” she points to, actually making physical contact with my pretty large belly in my oh-so-cute denim shirt.  Instinct, BsMommy mother-bear style, kicks in and I haul off and crack her hard in the face.  “How dare you?  I could call the cops on you.  That’s assault”.  And I will forever pride myself on how I handled this.  Sometimes I’m nervous under pressure, but not this time.  “Listen, my entire family is in law enforcement and we are surrounded by 20 of my close friends.  Who do you think they are going to believe?  The pregnant wife or the dirty tramp?  And for your information, THIS baby, he BEGGED me to have.  I didn’t even want children.  So you just might want to get your story a little straighter.  And if he wants you, he’s free to go at any time.  I however am leaving and I suggest you stay the f#$% away from me”.  With that, I walk away, out into the parking lot and sit on a stone wall by the lake.  My best girl Tammy (LOVE HER) stays there and talks to this girl and BsDaddy follows me and we talk outside.  We then leave and go home…and what follows is where it gets a little boring for awhile, so we’ll save that for the next one.  Tammy has the inside scoop on what the girl said during all that time.  But Tammy tells her “look if you have all this evidence you say you do, send it to her, leave them alone right now.  If he belongs with you, he’ll come back.  But leave them alone right now”.

And by the way that best girl, Tam, she had been tailing BsDaddy and found where he was parking and staying and this was all going to come out that weekend.  She was going to drive me over and let me walk in on it.  She wanted to be sure to have her facts right and not make a false accusation.  Remember she was a friend of both of us.  BsDaddys story is that they only kissed twice, never had sex and never was he planning on leaving me.  It was all an awful mistake.  This all gets a bit more clarified in the next chapter.  And we get to further prove him a liar.  

I’m so excited for you all to find the end.  Like present day end.  I actually saw this girl the other day, she lives right near Bs school.  The ending is kinda funny.  😉  But we have a long way to go.  Again no proofreading when I do these reflections, so forgive me for run-ons and any errors.  

More pics for Jolene…

The inside of “our youngest”…taken last September, but I got to go back on last weekend and check her back out.

 

Our youngest.

This is our youngest.  We became the proud parents of her, our youngest, last September.  However, we continued use of our “old” boat and left her at the shop because it was nearly time to winterize for the harsh NY winters.  We went to this shop browsing, hoping to see a similar, used boat that we’d found online.  This was parked out front.  It was bigger, brand new and exactly the colors we wanted.  Alas, the other boat was down in the water somewhere and hey, how about before we go look at that we take a peek at that gorgeous one out front?  The rest is history.  

 

 

One thing to know about my new husband and I is that in our prior relationship almost 4 years ago, we were on the boat every single time we were together.  We shared the most romantic moments of our lives on that boat and created a remarkable bond.  It wasn’t broken even in the two years apart, where we thought we might never be together again.  (But both secretly hoped we would be).  We were a blind date, and that’s a story that MUST be told for another day…once I’m done my whole divorce reflection that you guys are hungering for more of!

So our boat is pivotal and a huge part of our lives.  We needed more sleeping room.  In this one, we have our own “room”.  Each kid has their own bed.  So we can’t wait for our days on the lake.  Soon enough, mid-May, we have our first lesson with our new girl and take her to her home at our marina.  We’ve already got the personalized towels and I’m starting to shop for all the bedding and dinnerware.  (We already have the plastic wineglasses!).  And lucky me, my husband chose to name her after me.  🙂  Actually, after a pet name he created for me…and it will have two shamrocks on either side of the name.  We went to the graphic design guy last week to get it all set.  Exciting! 

And the playset is nearly done.  Can’t believe he built it all by himself!

Chapter 4!

Given what I know now, I can’t believe how foolish I was.  And naive.  I defended my then-husband right down to the wire.  I covered up that he wasn’t living with me (and later found out everyone knew anyway).  I was furious with my obstetrician’s office, which wrote on my chart in pretty big letters “husband not living with her, high stress”.  It was embarrassing.  I felt like every time I went in for a check up there was a big pity party.  I often brought BsDaddy lunch at work (he worked evenings, so theoretically it was dinner) and then I would buy him a shirt or something and bring that too…I was nurturing HIM, when I should have been being nurtured.  I promised him we would get him feeling better.  Only my closest friends knew I was living alone in the height of my pregnancy with my little B.  Nights, I would lie in bed, reading aloud to my ever-expanding middle, feeling her move and talking to her.  I always told her “It may be just the two of us girly, but your Mommy will make sure you never go without.  You’ll have everything a little girl needs and your Mommy loves you more than anything ever”.  She started moving and seemed to love classical music and oddly enough, Rage Against the Machine.  What a mix.  She’s still like that.  Diverse in musical genre.  We bonded over those several months.  I worked on the nursery with my Mom, had a baby shower at work, and two others, one with the in-laws and one with my family.  It was all coming together, except for the marriage.  

One day, my parents were at my house and the husband stopped in and was stalking through the house, grabbing things left and right, all attitude and very weird.  He freaked out thinking we hid his shoes on him, so he couldn’t leave…and really he’d just forgotten where they were.  He threw out a McDonald’s bag in my garbage and stormed off in his truck.  My parents just sat there, completely stunned.  He was a totally different person.  Finally, I had him take an online test to diagnose depression and he scored severely depressed.  He went to the doctor and got medication.  Slowly he got a bit better.  Some nights, he would come and stay with me and rub my back, helping me to fall asleep, but would sneak out shortly thereafter and I would awake at three am, alone in my bed.  And there was never any sex during that time.  No way…despite my raging horomones.  I’m not THAT dumb.  I remember specifically one night when he left, I sat in the middle of my kitchen floor sobbing, trying to figure out how I was going to do all of this…pay for this house, take care of this baby, go through childbirth.  Sometimes I would call his parents house, where he was supposedly staying and he wouldn’t be there and they would say he was at his friends house.   A friend I knew…and when I called there he wouldn’t be there…or it would be too late to call.  (All before cell phones…it would be easier now to catch someone!).

One night, he came home, crawled into bed and when I awoke he said, “It’s all going to be ok, I’m back now”.  He was still there when I awoke the next morning.  This was May 1st, 1999.  I remember acting affectionate and him saying “It’s not all better, but I’m here…we’ll be ok, it just takes time”.  It was a sunny, gorgeous, beautiful morning and the birds were chirping.  I thought my life was coming together finally-the future I’d dreamed of.  I was so hopeful.  We went outside, to wash our cars and play with our dog…(we miss you Scout)-and a black Honda drove by ever so slowly.  I asked about it, and he hadn’t seen it.  Then…it came back.  And stopped, down by our front lawn, across from our mailbox.  The window was down and a blonde yelled “BsDaddy, what the hell are you doing here?”.  He quickly grabbed his shirt, put it on and walked down the lawn to the car, after telling me to just “hold on a minute”.  I heard his reply to her “I LIVE here.  This is my home.”.  And then, I went inside.  I grabbed the phone and called my in-laws house and described what was going on.  My father-in-law told me to get outside and stop it right then.  But I couldn’t breathe.  I sank to the floor in the nursery, was having false contractions and listened through the window.  What went down next shaped the rest of my life and the future of my little girl.  And I felt idiotic, it seemed what others had suggested might have been true-was he having an affair while he was gone???  How could it be since I’d given him every chance to get out?  And he claimed to love me, and want us to remain together always.  

Stay tuned…you’ll get to meet the blonde.  There was another girl in the car…but I still don’t know who that was.  She’s obviously irrelevant.  

P.S. If it’s kinda scattered, it’s because although I’ve always wanted to write all of this out…I never have.  And I’m just typing as I remember it all.  It’s a bit cathartic, so we’ll see how I feel at the end.

Chapter 3!

Sorry ladies, I was raking and doing yard work while the husband worked on building this .  So anyway, to continue (just a short one, I was planning on updating tomorrow, but got some emails on my Blackberry that people were wanting more 😉  ).  

So, all is happy and well.  Throughout the winter, the excitement is so fabulous!  I want a boy and can’t wait until February to find out what we are having.  We choose a name, Grady Vaughn for the son we think we are having.  Before our sonogram, we both write on a slip of paper what we think we are having and put it in our pockets, to open after we find out the gender.  The doctor double checks to make sure that we want to know and we both look at each other…hesitant.  She tells us.  It’s a girl!!!  Isn’t that great?  I think we both sank.  No, actually rephrase that, I think I sank.  How funny that seems to me now, since I can’t possibly imagine a son, as B has redefined my femininity in countless ways.  And of course, both of our slips of paper, which we unfolded slowly and carefully said “boy”.  Well we adjusted our line of thinking and started “thinking pink”.  And kept getting excited.  Well, in March, I noticed a serious change in BsDaddy.  He was quiet and reserved, where he was once hyper and completely devoted to me.  It was bizarre.  I remember calling my parents when they were on vacation in Maine and they both said it was my hormones…I was exaggerating, and BsDaddy said that too.  I began to think I was nuts.  After about a month or so of his behavior which was very, very odd (remember, I’d been with him since I was 19, and I was now 25-I knew how he was, so I knew that this was off).   Finally one night, I would not let him go to bed and made him stay up until he came clean.  “I don’t know what’s wrong.  I just can’t be here anymore”.  I was aghast “WHAT?  You get me pregnant and now you want to split up?”.  “No” he said “I don’t want a divorce.  I just can’t be in this house right now”.  Ok, I admit.  I had no idea what the heck was going on.  I don’t remember what I said.  I called my Mom and told her I was a failure and that I was as bad as all those other women with no husband.  I got in my car and crying hysterically drove the 25 minutes to my parents.  My mom slept with me on the spare bed and rubbed my belly until I finally cried myself to sleep.  Yup.  She spooned me.  It was rather sweet, now, looking back.  Enough for now…he left.  When I got back home, he was staying at his parents and I have to admit, it all gets rather hazy now.  Isn’t it amazing how the human mind protects us?

Just hang on…I’ll get some more in tomorrow.  😉

 

Chapter 2-Part 1

So, armed with a beautiful diamond on my left hand, I kept up the groupie lifestyle, all the while planning THE WEDDING.  Which I wasn’t so about, but I am my parent’s only daughter and the in-laws only had two sons, so it was pretty much mandatory.  I often sat back and let the mothers go.  During the engagement, we spent all our spare time together and had a BLAST.  Mind you, there was a minor blip on the radar.  Here and there.  But in the scheme of how doting and worshipping this guy was, I dismissed it.  I’m pretty forgiving and I really don’t like conflict, so I’m not about arguing.  During all of this, I’m in college and working pretty much full-time at retail outlets in a nearby town.  A good girlfriend of mine dropped a bomb on me at one point that she’d been out dancing and overheard someone saying how they were “hanging out with “BsDaddy” (insert his full first and last name here) and that it was going great and they were having a blast.  She wouldn’t tell me right away and I had to pry it out of her babysitter, since she was at work and was waiting to tell me until we could spend some time on it.  I wanted to know NOW.  As was the norm for the future, I immediately went to the BsDaddy and asked him.  And he denied vehemently.  WHY would I do that?  I adore you, I just asked you to marry me…you are everything…yada yada yada.  And I believed him without a doubt.  A little while later (but just enough time lapsed so I didn’t connect the two events) when I arrived at his parents room and went downstairs to his bedroom where he was practicing guitar, he jumped up and started verbally sparring with me.  Who had I slept with?  How dare I lie to him?  He knew I was.  Ok, I admit, I hadn’t been with anyone else, but I started to question myself, he was SO SURE I had been cheating.  Did I blank out and fall into someone elses bed?  I thought maybe I was going nuts.  Well he kept going on and on and finally said he’d been to the doctor because he had gotten “crabs”.  Ok…I am completely not sure how we ever justified that one as him not cheating, but I vaguely remember that back then he told me that his brothers friends had slept in his bed when we were away or something and maybe that happened or some similar thing that sounded good-because that’s what I wanted to believe.  But he made me believe.  Sound manipulative?  Blaming me when it was really him?  Yeah, now I see that it was.  But I was 19, and this boy was so clearly in love with me.  Our friends always raved about how lucky I was, how they wished they had that type of relationship.  So that got swept under the rug too.  Alright, next clue.  One night he comes home from work, to my parents house to hang out like we normally did.  And he walks in the door and tells me that tomorrow morning he’s moving from the towns where we’ve grown up in NY, to SC.  Tomorrow morning.  He has a job and has to start in a few days.  WHAT?  Apparently, his parents knew and they didn’t feel I needed to know.  Engaged or not.  Fiancee did say, well, do you want to come too?  It will be great.  But I was in college.  I stood firm.  Later that night he left (short version here) and the next morning on my way to college I stopped to see him, and when I walked into his room and saw all the boxes stacked, it hit me.  And I sat down on the floor and sobbed.  He comforted me, reassured me…and promised me (on The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, my all time favorite book), that we would be getting married and everything would be fine.  Boxes still upset me to this day.  It sounds funny, but really, it’s not.  He left me his blanket which smelled like him and his favorite shirt and wrote me huge letters and songs and called me every day several times a day.  I started planning to transfer schools and my Mom wrote me a letter about choices and how she was completely against this.  It was a stressful time. I’d call down there and it would be late at night and he wasn’t there.  His best friend (who he had moved down there to live with I think) said he had run out to the store.  Yeah.  Ok.   Eventually I decided to bail out and told him no way.  I’m not going.  He came home almost immediately.  Back to his old job.  He was only gone about 3 months I believe…this was a long time ago. This reassured me that he was completely devoted to me.  It’s crazy.  The wedding approached quickly, we planned and enjoyed that summer and the wedding went off without a hitch.  We left for Hawaii around 3 in the morning for our 2 week honeymoon, and had so much fun.  After we came home, we lived together for the first time, and loved every second.  Every morning we woke up and said how grateful we were.  It really was bliss. After a year in our first house, we moved to a more central location between my job and his job, and out of his hometown, to our great log house (the red house B calls it), with 20 acres of land, a babbling brook, and an inground pool.  It was heaven.  A year after that he told me he wanted a baby.  After a little persuasion, I agreed the timing was right, but I was only having ONE!!!  I had a blossoming career, was very content and liked the way it was.  But we were so in love, I wanted a baby that was an extension of that as well.  And he really, really wanted a baby.  So, there we went. Within 3 months, we were pregnant.  I have the charts to prove when we were trying!  I actually think I know the time she was conceived.  🙂  I ate incredibly healthy, gave up caffeine, kept my exercise up and it was so fun.  This was the most amazing time of my life.  I found out around October that I was pregnant.  She was due in July.  Things all went seriously wrong sometime around January/February.  And that will be the next chapter…

 

P.S. My back feels a bit better!  The doctor gave me an anti-inflammatory, I tried a new pillow and did not sleep on my stomach.  Maybe this is a pulled muscle.  But it also helped to alleviate the regular back stiffness and soreness I have every single morning, so I was pretty excited!  And we were kid-free last night  B went to her Nana and Poppa’ and stepson is at his moms for spring break week.  

Back/neck pain.

I am and have been, in much pain for the last few days.  I’ve had a stiff back upon waking and sitting too long, for a long time now.  This is different.  This is really painful.  So today, I finally caved and went to the doctor and got the ball rolling.  He gave me a prescription to try for a week and if that doesn’t wind it down, then it’s all the whole X-ray deal again.  But seriously, this guy dropped the words “bone tumor” before I was even done describing things.  What kind of person even mentions that on our first appointment?

For that someone who “gets” me…

…your email was fabulously enlightening and very helpful.  And comforting.  I feel for you and keep thinking of all you’ve endured.  To get your own emails separately from your joint marital email address, you can use something like hotmail.com, or gmail.com.  You can sign up and access them both from any computer, whenever you want and no one has to know.  Our husbands may never understand blogging as therapy, unfortunately.  Hope to hear from you soon!

Enthusiastic fan.

For those of you eagerly awaiting the story of how my single parenting came to be…well that story is about to be told.  Probably in several segments.  The first of which will be called “The Groupie Days”.  

I was home from college for summer break, after my freshman year away.  I went with one of my male high school cheerleading buddies (best friend of my high school boyfriend) to hear a band that he said I would love.  They were practicing in someones garage.  My college boyfriend was home at his house in a city two and a half hours away.  We’d been together nearly a year.  We pulled into a small house in a nearby town and you could hear the music emanating from inside the garage.  We walked in, and I immediately locked eyes with a dark brown eyed, well built guy singing Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses”.  Both of us remember staying in that eye-lock for that whole song.  There were other members of that band (I should know, you marry one, you marry all five), but I didn’t ever really “see” any of them.  Even when later on, the drummer came up to me at a bar and said “Hi there…how are you?  I’m the drummer”…in a trying-to-be-smooth kind of way, blue eyes, dark hair and all…I was always about that Bon Jovi singing lead-singer, bass player.  Later that same night, at a nearby bar, the flirtation was high, the banter in full swing.  So, for the next few weeks, I went and heard his band play.  He winked at me, sang to me…and when his girlfriend was there, he’d sneak these passing glances and little comments in.  Yeah, he had a girlfriend.  Sorry to her…I did apologize later to this girl.  I spared her a lot of pain actually.  🙂  Finally, I was at a friends house and the buddy who introduced us called that friend.  He asked to talk to me and told me that G was interested in me and wanted to hang out.  I was all aflutter. He gave me a ride home one night and we talked.  That’s it just talked.  At another gig in the next few days, his girlfriend confronted me and asked if he had given me a ride home.  I said yes, but it was just that a ride home.  No worries.   Big sign right here, he had lied to her and told her we didn’t ride together, so when I said that we had, his eyes got huge and she yelled at him right there.  Ew.  Drama.  Crazy girlfriend.  Yuck.  (But was she really, I’d be mad too!)  I went to the next gig, he gave me a ride home and we played Super Mario Brothers.  🙂  He kissed me.  I told him that before anything was ever going to go anywhere with me, he needed to decide what he was doing with his girlfriend.  And I sent him on his way.  Apparently, he immediately broke up with her.  He called me, told me that it was over and it slowly began to be more rides home, longer kisses…and endless nights of him singing to me.  In public, in private…wrapping himself around my heart.  Love letters, phone calls, every waking second together, completely enjoying another person in the fullest sense on every level, for the first time in my life.  THIS was a best friend.  AND an ideal match.  We just fit.  We had so much fun together.  Sports, family, friends…life was exciting and fun.  We talked about marriage and when we’d be married.  We described the rings I liked, looked at them in stores.  I knew he’d be giving it to me that next summer.  Guess what?  He couldn’t wait.  He proposed one day in the spring.  After 8 months together.  I was so excited.  The first one of my friends to get engaged, I was thrilled to set a date nearly two years down the road after I’d be out of college.  Let the planning begin.  Oh wait.  Did I mention my Mom’s face when I told her?  Yeah, it wasn’t what I would call thrilled.  Not at all.  And that boyfriend I had at college? I ended that the second I knew that G was done with his girlfriend.  I didn’t have one doubt about this relationship.  (Maybe that’s why at the beginning of the summer when I first met him I told my girlfriends, “that guy will marry me someday”).  I’d never been so sure of anything.  That surety continued right up until I was 6 months pregnant with our lovely little princess.  And ever since it ended, I’ve been sure of nothing again, except my complete love and devotion to her.

(What lies ahead?  Oh, the tell tale signs that happened throughout the engagement and then the marriage, and then the pregnancy…so at least a few more chapters).