GrumpyDaddy

I wish to register a complaint. My complaint is with the jargon one has to work with when discussing your married relationships should you have been married more than once. The vocabulary of past marriages really is rather limiting in choice and makes no-one look good. Nor does it allow one to fully explain one's situation without having to digress.

When I talk about my "first wife" it implies several things. Firstly that I've had more than one wife - which is fair enough. Secondly that the first marriage ended in divorce - it didn't. And finally that I'm the kind of reprehensible dirtbag that can't honour my wedding vows - I'm not. For me the biggest problem with the phrase is it implies that I'm talking about someone who no longer means much to me, when quite the opposite is true.

Today should be a happy day. If Lanie had lived she would be celebrating her 37th birthday today. Her gorgeous twins and I would probably have made her a cake and took her somewhere special for dinner. I like to believe the alternate-worlds view of cosmology partly because it means somewhere that's exactly what is happening right now.

And meanwhile in this universe my wonderful Jo and I are planning a very special birthday for the twins next week, with our ridiculously cute baby Will, who doesn't exist in that alternate reality. It seems every universe has its own unique pain and suffering, but also has unique gifts things that make us so very happy.

Maybe there's even an alternate universe where Lanie can read this blog post and knows that I miss her so much and wish her a wonderful happy birthday.

I recently received the official wedding photos for mine and Lanie’s wedding. I won’t bore you with why it’s taken over three years for me to receive the photos we paid for - at least I have them now and that’s that.

The pictures made for difficult viewing as you’d expect. Lanie died within six months of those photos being taken and every bit of them is drenched in sadness because of that. However I’m glad to have them, both as a memory of an astonishingly important and wonderful event and because I really don’t have as many pictures of Lanie as I’d like. One day the twins will want to see these.

Another reason the pictures were hard to look at was the complete cock Lanie and I made of the wedding. Getting pregnant with twins really messed up the plans for the dress. We got the music badly wrong and made a terrible job of making our guests feel welcome. And I was so nervous I spent the morning puking. Lanie and I would laugh about all these weeks later, but I still feel embarrassed that we didn’t mingle properly with our guests - sorry once again folks.