Today

Yesterday was a weepy day. At least 4 occasions of tears.

There's a post to come about my husband's terrible money management skills, taught to him by his awful, terrible, boy how I hate them parents, but that's for another day.

I realized yesterday that basically, this is a rough week. As much as I would dearly love to forget the date, today is the one year anniversary of the due date of my lost pregnancy. I can tell myself a million times due dates don't mean anything (my daughter? 7 days late), but it's still a milestone.

And my 9th wedding anniversary - you know, the day my husband stood up and promised to forsake all others - is the 7th.

Last year we drove home from our week-long beach vacation on this day. I thought it had been an absolutely glorious, nearly perfect vacation. A few months later my husband disabused me of that notion, explaining one of the nights he stayed up later than me he was planning his escape. He also told me he had intentionally wiped the due date from his mind, so that explains why on the ride home I was quiet and he was irritable - which we both chalked up to end of vacation blues, I guess.

I grew up in this teeny, tiny hometown of 3,000 people. My best friend is a guy I've known since kindergarten. He married a woman from New Zealand and lives there now, and last year vacationed at his parent's house, with his three girls, twins my daughter's age (then nearly 2) and a 3.5 year old. We spent 4 of the 7 days with them, and it was fabulous. I thought. One of my college friends and her husband, with whom we traveled to the New Zealand wedding in 2003, who currently lives 1000 miles away and has a daughter who was 4, and who had become friends with my hometown friend, came to visit for 2 days, too.

I found out my college friend was going to be able to visit about a week before the vacation. I called my husband at work and nearly cried from sheer joy - the thought of spending time with these two close friends and all our kids together, playing on the beaches and boardwalks of my youth. It was a moment of sheer, piercing joy. A joy I hadn't experienced in a long, long time, given the pregnancy loss 6 months before.

My husband and I rented a condo for the week and spent time plotting how we could buy an investment property at the beach. I came home with hundreds of pictures - mine and from my friends. Great pictures of 6 happy adults in the prime of their lives, with their happy, healthy 5 girls. I planned to actually print these out, put them in a memory book - a week well worth remembering and celebrating and reminiscing. I rode home from the beach in a bittersweet mood - realizing that had my lost baby been born, we never would have had this perfect vacation. I never did print out all the pictures, and a mere two months later discovered my husband's perfidy and duplicity.

I've written before that my husband stole my past, present, and future. This is how he stole the past. How do I view that vacation (our last for a long time) now? I can't view it as perfect and golden, because it wasn't. It is tainted. And my present? My anniversary on Thursday? Right now, it still makes me sick to my stomach to think of celebrating that day. Based on how easily he can discard his vows, it has no meaning to him, though he will suggest lunch out and a card. I'll get him a simple card and just sign it, and that's all I can manage for a long, long time. And my future? The jury's still out on that, isn't it? This summer has been hard, reliving last summer. The signs I missed, the lies he told. The fall will be tougher, amplified by all these lovely pregnancy hormones floating about. It's hard not to think I've made a Faustian bargain with the devil - relative security and help raising child(ren) now, for what? Further infidelity in two years? 5 years? 10 years? Divorce, or me putting up with a serial cheater to maintain a household for my child(ren)? Am I now one of those women who turns a blind eye to maintain what I have in life?

My college friend had her second child, a boy, in May. My New Zealand friend's wife is pregnant with their 4th, a boy, due in October. I'm pregnant with my second, a boy, due in November.

We're all casually kicking around travel to NZ in 2011, for the Rugby World cup. 6 happy adults, 5 girls, 3 boys. It could be a perfect, glorious, golden holiday. The kind you talk about in your old age. The pictures would be amazing. Will they tell the true story?