Tomorrow is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day my H and I met. Next weekend is the first anniversary of his first (that I know of) "date" with the OW. If you know what went wrong with your marriage, perhaps your kids can avoid the same problem. You can tell them not to marry too young, or an alcoholic, or whatever, but how can you tell them that the way to identify that someone will desert his family is that he will find it hard to resist bringing home kittens, puppies, and lambs. Or that when his best friend's wife has a baby, he will find it so irresistible that he would suggest totally out of the blue that we have one (we didn't, till much later).<P>My H took the kids to dinner tonight, and announced to them that he was going on vacation and wouldn't be seeing them for two weeks. Maybe they are going away then to celebrate their "anniversary". <P>My son has asked him repeatedly to see them more often, and he has continued to reduce the frequency with which he sees them. I am tired of pretending to the kids that he loves them, when he obviously doesn't give a d*** about them. Maybe he never did care about them - they were an amusing hobby, but he tired of them after awhile, just like he has given up every other activity he has ever been involved in. My H did not give the kids or me any idea of where he was going. When I took a couple of the kids on vacation, he asked for an itinerary and the number of the hotel. I didn't think that it was an unreasonable request, so that he could reach me in case of emergency. Unless he decides to tell me in the next few days, I will have no idea where in the world he is going. If there were an emergency, he wouldn't find out until he came back.<P>He is going to be gone over his fiftieth birthday, so the kids won't get to see him then. He told me once that he would like to have a fourtieth birthday party. I didn't feel up to arranging one because I had a three week old infant at the time, and I got the impression that he has been resentful ever since. We never had a honeymoon - we often talked about going away for our twentieth anniversary, which will be this winter. We have never spent a night away from the kids, we have had a vacation about once every four years. Now he can freely go away whenever he wishes - he no longer has any responsibility, and she apparently can get rid of her kids whenever she wishes. I asked him to have a vasectomy after our 4th, 5th, and 6th children - he finally did, and admits that he is resentful about that. <P>He has almost always gotten exactly what he wanted - he wants to give up his job and go into business for himself, and he talks me into it. He wants to buy a new vehicle with some of the equity from the sale of our home, I want to buy a used one, and we buy a new one. He wanted me to go back to work, and now he has put me in a position where I was forced to. I get to drive the kids back and forth to college, as much as a seven hour round trip, for every holiday, and he doesn't even ask what I am going to do with the little ones. He does not care at all about what is going on in their lives. He obviously doesn't want to be a real father anymore.
