Tuesday 19th September  would have been my 12 year wedding anniversary, and would also have meant that my husband and I would have been a couple for 18 years. That is a long time but as fate would have it my husband left me 3 years ago instead. On our daughter’s 2nd birthday. That was a  hard party to get through. It hurt. I loved him very much. But he just didn’t love me back (as Andie so succinctly put it in Pretty in Pink).

Truth be told, this year  I didn’t remember. It was only because I needed to check the date for work purposes that it struck me. I remembered it last year, and all the other years. If things were different my husband and I would have met after work for drinks, champagne probably, pink – always my favorite, and dinner. We would have reminisced about the wedding, talked about our gorgeous daughter and I would look at him, thinking how lucky I was that this wonderful man chose me, that there was no one else in the whole world I would rather spend time with, that when I see him I still get butterflies in my tummy.

But none of that happened. We divorced last year. Lucia recently found a box of my framed wedding photos that I had taken down as soon as my husband left and she has put them up in her room. I can’t tell her not to, we are her parents and she likes to look at the photos, of my long white dress and daddy looking so handsome. She loves a wedding. But when I look at them now they don’t make me sad anymore, it is like looking at another lifetime. Different people. Lu likes to play dress up in my wedding dress and I tell her it was the most amazing day of my life, which is was, apart from the day she arrived of course.

She asks me lots of questions about the ‘big’ day, about the church and the party after, about her daddy and I dancing together and it makes her smile with so much happiness. When she is older (than the 5 years old now she is now) I’ll tell her that when daddy and I went off to the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge where we had a suite in one of the turrets for our wedding night,that most of the the guests  went off to Orange at Fire in Vauxhall as they had all been put on the guest list, wandering around with our table centre piece flowers. I love that story. It really reflected us and our friends, Dan ran Fabric and most of our friends worked in the club industry. It was a wonderful day, a day of love and happiness, champagne and laughter.

But that was then and this is now. My heart remains a little bruised but it is healing nicely.