I keep trying to tell myself that today is just another day, but it's not. It's the first Friday of the month, which means that I will be alone all weekend until Sunday night. Without my kids I do tend to get more work done, but I miss them terribly. I miss the times when I didn't have to part with them every other weekend. I miss not being a family all the time. Maybe explaining my story will help you understand what I am talking about.

My parents divorced when I was just a little girl and my mother was awarded custody of me. She remarried her long time boyfriend when I was in high school. I decided on my own to move in with my dad to give the newly weds the alone time they deserved. I do like my step-dad, but I really would like to give them space to do whatever they want without having to worry about me. A few weeks before my sophomore year in high school, I moved from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington. Little did I know how much that little town would change my life.

I spent most of those weeks before school getting unpacked and ready for school. I managed to find time to read and meet, or be reintroduced to at least, some of the people in town. My dad, being the Chief of Police, knows everyone in town and almost everything that happens. I swear he was worse than some of the old women in town when it came to gossip. Anyway, he brought me to meet everyone in the neighborhood. Along that journey, I met a few classmates and many people who remembered me from when I was a baby, before my parents divorced.

The family that I met that day and liked the most, was the Hale family. The oldest Hale kids, Rosalie and Jasper, were my age and really cool. There was absolutely no mistaking the fact that they were twins and they ended up being my first friends in Forks. They told me of their friends and how I would get along with them so well. Rosalie had planned to introduce me to them before school started, but neither of us seemed to be free at the same time. Rosalie and Jasper picked me up and brought me to school the first day to save me the embarrassment of riding with my dad in the police cruiser.

It didn't take long before I met their friends. Very long story short, Emmett, Rosalie's boyfriend, ended up being like a brother to me. He tried to give me a hard time until Rose told him that she would not speak to him for the rest of the day if he didn't stop. Well he stopped and it was then I met Jasper's girlfriend Alice. She was a petite girl who seemed like she was always hyper, and quickly became one of my best friends. Alice's brother, Edward, became a very good friend at first. It was a little bit before I found out that he was on the football team, so many girls had their eyes on him. He didn't pay them much attention though. Instead, he and I goofed around a lot, and when I say a lot I mean a lot. Most of the time we didn’t spend doing homework or other things, we were together.

It was late fall and getting closer to the end of the football season. Edward and I had spent quite a bit of time together and I had developed a crush on him, which wasn't hard to do with his good looks and amazing personality. We flirted and were so comfortable with each other that none of it fazed us. The football team was doing extremely well and ended up going to the playoffs. Homecoming was coming up very soon, as the football season was drawing to a close, no matter if the team made it to states or not. I didn’t have any intentions of even going to the dance.

One day at lunch, Edward deiced to bring us Chinese food for lunch, with the fortune cookies of course. We ate the meal and opened up the cookies. I was pleasantly surprised to find a fortune in mine that asked me to the dance. I looked at Edward to see of he knew what was going on and he was sitting there with one white lily that seemed to appear out of nowhere in his had with a hopeful expression on his face. It only took me a minute to figure out that it was his way of asking me out. I said yes and we had been dating since then. He was my high school sweetheart.

At the end of high school, I went to the University of Washington Spokane and Edward went to Evergreen State, but we managed to stay good and strong through school. We graduated college on the same day, him in the morning and me in the afternoon. We moved into an apartment together shortly after that. He proposed to me seven years to the day of our first date. How could I say no? He was everything I ever thought I wanted in a husband plus more. He was quite romantic and brought up the idea of getting married on Valentine's Day. I told him that many people had the same idea and I wanted a day that we didn't have to share with a holiday. With me being a teacher and he a banker, we were a little limited as to when we could get time off to get married and take our honeymoon. But Alice, being the amazing person she is, suggested we tie the knot in April. It would be spring so everything would be either in blossom or blossoming and a nice temperature to have a comfortable wedding.

Our wedding spurred the wheels in Jasper’s and Emmett's heads about marrying their girlfriends. Jasper proposed to Alice out of the blue one day, not at all what anyone was expecting, and got married the September following our wedding. Emmett, knowing that Rose loved her cars, unhooked the battery in her car one night after she had gone to bed and put a note on the battery saying that she would forgive him and asking her to go inside. He was in their kitchen waiting for her with a box of chocolates and a gorgeous diamond ring. She immediately forgave him and said yes. They wed in a surprisingly small ceremony in the middle of May, a year after Edward and I.

We wed in a fairly small ceremony at the park in town because neither of us were religious people. We wanted a wedding that wouldn't cost a fortune to pay for and was very meaningful. Our honeymoon destination was where the majority of our money went. We decided to spend a week and a half in Tahiti because most other cities with beaches would be flooded with families on spring break. Our marriage was going wonderfully and seemed to be on the right track. We wanted kids, but where we were fairly young, we decided to wait a little bit before having any.

Shortly after our second anniversary I started noticing that I felt different. I shook it off thinking that it was nothing major, only stress from buying a new house and getting settled in. The feeling didn't seem to go away and I had missed my monthly cycle, but nothing else happened. I decided to make an appointment with my doctor to see if my suspicions were correct. Edward's father, Carlisle, was a doctor and he had many good friends in the medical industry. When I first moved in with my dad, Carlisle had suggested my doctor to me after I had broken my wrist trying to catch myself as I was falling out of a tree in the yard.

I trusted Carlisle, but I wasn't quite comfortable with having him as a doctor so I went with his suggestion. I told Edward that I had a doctor’s appointment that day, but he assumed that it was my yearly physical so he didn't suspect anything. I wasn't counting on Carlisle being in the practice that day and asking me why I was in before I was due for a physical. Being a doctor, and also my father-in-law, he knew about our decision to wait a little bit and figured it out on his own that I thought I might be pregnant. Carlisle was just about as big, if not bigger, a gossip than my dad and told both his wife Esme and my father that I had been to see my doctor. Esme came to see me a couple days later at work and took me out to lunch. She asked me if her gossiping husband was correct in his assumptions that I was pregnant. I told her that I had just found out that morning the results came back positive and she was going to be a grandma. She congratulated me and said that her hubby would probably tell her the same thing when he got home from work that night. I laughed and told her my theory of my dad and Carlisle getting together a couple times a week to catch each other up on what the other hadn't heard for rumors. She laughed in agreement as we paid the bill and left the restaurant.

That night I told Edward when he got home from work. He was shocked because neither of us were expecting it, but he was elated. He could not wait for the baby to come. I had my regular check ups throughout my pregnancy. My due date was in March and I took my maternity leave three weeks before my due date just to be safe. My third graders were sad to say goodbye to me and only let me go after promising to bring my baby in after he was born. Edward took a week and a half off around my due date and his mom came and stayed with me when he was working the last two weeks before I was due. The last day Edward worked before his time off was when our son decided to make his entrance. Esme said that I had seemed a little off for the entire day, but figured that I might just be tired because the baby's kicking was keeping me awake. Literally right when Edward opened the front door, I started to go into labor. Esme laughed and said our son just wanted to wait for his daddy.

After ten excruciating hours of labor, I had our baby boy tucked safely into my arms as he slept and I fought the battle to keep my eyes open. Edward was finally able to convince me to sleep and he would keep an eye on our son, Dylan Chase Cullen. Later that day, our friends and family trickled in to see our adorable little baby. He certainly didn't mind being passed from person to person, because he slept like a log. Edward and I could only hope that he would be that way when we brought him home. We were lucky enough to have Esme and Carlisle nearby in case anything went wrong or we were concerned. Thankfully, Dylan was a good baby and nothing major happened. Our life was going pretty good, the occasional argument, but that happened to every couple so we didn't worry. I had gone back to work when Dylan was almost a year and a half old and everyone was happy to have me back.

It was very shortly after I went back to work that I found out I was pregnant again. Edward was happy to have another child on the way, as was I. The timing for our kids was perfect because Emmett and Rose had their first baby a few months previously and Alice was due with her and Jasper's baby anytime. Our second baby was a little girl named Brooklynn Marie Cullen born the day before Mother's Day. Life was good after Brooklynn was born and I stayed at home with the kids for a little while. Edward made a good amount of money and he had a trust fund that his grandparents had set up for him when before he was born.

The fights started when I was tired from being at home all day with a hyper toddler and teething baby. Edward was starting to slowly spend more time at work because he really wanted a promotion. He didn't want all the crappy hours that came with being a banker. He didn't want to work Saturdays and only have federal holidays off. I could see that, but when he got home he was a little grumpier each week. He would come home with paperwork sometimes, as I did when I was still working, so I didn't say anything about that. I didn't say anything about us being intimate less. I didn't say anything about him not doing much around the house anymore. I did say something about him not spending much time with the kids anymore though. He used to spend as much time with the kids as he could and then he didn't seem to want to be around them, except to tuck them in and while eating supper.

It wasn’t that long before I had asked Esme if she minded watching the kids for one weekend, of course she was more than willing to watch her grandbabies. I didn’t want to have a potentially life altering argument with them around.

Edward had gotten home from work early for the first time in quite a while. I had to remind him where the kids were when he walked through the door.  I told him we needed to talk and he asked if it could wait because he had a headache. I could not put it off any more. He was not too happy when I told him that but I knew he would not be any happier if I had told him that it could wait.

“What’s going on? Is something bothering you?” he asked.

“Yes, something is going on and it is bothering me” I replied.

“Well what is it?” he asked after a pause.

“Why does it seem like you have been avoiding the kids lately?” I asked.

“Avoiding the kids? Why would I be avoiding the kids? I love them and they have done nothing to cause me to want to avoid them” he answered.

“You may not see that you are avoiding them, but I do. You are gone before they wake up. You come home later than you ever have and when you get home, you disappear to your office or the bedroom until supper is ready. After supper is over, you go right back to doing whatever and then come out to tuck the kids into bed. The only times they see you on a regular basis is during supper and bedtime. Obviously Brooklynn can’t say anything, but anyone can tell from her demeanor that she misses her daddy. Dylan has asked a couple times where you are and it breaks my heart to have to say ‘work’ every single time. I really want to be able to see you spend time with them again. Your mother has asked me what is going on with you and why you have been spending more time away from home and at work. I hate telling her that I’m not quite sure why. Could you please tell me what’s going on? I really miss the Edward that I first fell in love with, married and started a family with” I ranted.

“Bella, I have been spending more time at work because I want to be able to have more flexible hours, but I am still the Edward that you fell in love with, married and started a family with. To be honest, I didn’t even realize that I was hurting you or the kids. I really want to be able to spend more time with Brooke and Dyl, but I have so much work to do before I can get that promotion” he replied.

“So now you are going to make excuses about not spending as much time with our son and daughter? I’m sorry, but I can’t allow that. I still love you and I always will, but I don’t know what I will do if you continue to act like this. Brooke and Dylan are getting older and will soon understand that something is going on with Mommy and Daddy. I grew up like that so I know what it’s like and I don’t want that for our children. I know you want that promotion, but there is no way I will allow you to see them for that short a time” I fired back.

“Bella, I can’t promise anything because I know that I have a long way ahead of me before I get that promotion.  I know how you grew up and I don’t want that for them either. I love all three of you with everything that I am and I would do anything for you, which is why I have been working towards this promotion. It sucks right now, but it will get better” he tried to soothe me.

“When? When will it get better? Another year? I won’t stand to see you act this way for another year. I know you want this promotion badly, but I can’t handle this for much longer Edward!”

That was not the end of our argument, but with the language that we used, I will not repeat the rest of it. I gave Edward another six weeks and if he hadn’t changed for the better by then, I would separate from him. He had changed so that he was spending more time with the kids and me, but he only stayed that way for two weeks before he started to slowly slip back to the way he was before our fight. I warned him after a month that if he wasn’t better in two weeks, I would file for separation and possible even divorce. He blew up at me saying that I didn’t understand what he was going through to get the promotion. He made me feel like I was the bad guy, but I wasn’t.

Two and a half weeks later I kicked him out of the house and told him to get his act together and if he didn’t, I would file for divorce in a month. He lived with his parents in that time and if anything, threw himself into his work even more. I hated to do it, but I filed for divorce once the month was over. It upset our families very deeply, but I couldn’t stand to have him all but ignore us anymore. We went to court for custody of the kids. Where Edward worked much more than I did, I was granted primary custody. Edward got to have them every other weekend and some holidays.

By the time our divorce and the custody were finalized, Dylan was getting ready to start kindergarten and Brooklynn was almost three. I know they missed their Daddy terribly, but I just couldn’t tell them why Mommy and Daddy didn’t live together anymore, they wouldn’t understand anyway. It was difficult raising them on my own and working at the same time, but Carlisle and Esme were still willing to watch their grandkids while I was working or needed time to myself. My dad watched them once in a while too, but it was hard for him when we usually worked at the same time. Alice and Rosalie loved watching them and having our kids play together, but they were busy too.

When Brooklynn was in second grade, the five year mark of our divorce came and passed. I had heard through the grapevine that Edward had dated a few women, but never stayed with them very long. I had not dated; I didn’t have the time or the interest to invest in it. When the man that I loved was my ex-husband, I couldn’t do anything about it. During the summer, I let the kids spend more time with their dad when he was on vacation. I was starting to regret divorcing Edward because I missed spending time with him and raising the kids together.

The summer after Dylan turned eleven, Edward decided to take the kids to Disneyland in California. I met him at the airport the day they were scheduled to fly out of the Seattle- Tacoma Airport. I had brought the kids a little earlier than Edward had asked so that I could spend a little bit more time with them before they left me for a week. Of course being a Cullen, Edward was already there when I arrived. I really wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what to say. My brain just stopped working while standing there; staring at the man I divorced six years earlier. I hadn’t seen him from less than a hundred feet away in three years and he hadn’t changed, other than physically looking a few years older (I imagine the crazy hours and stress had gotten to him).

Their flight was delayed to do engine problems in the plane, so we sat and talked for hours while the kids napped and they waited for their flight. It turned out he missed me as much as I missed him. The flight had been canceled until the next day, so Edward booked a hotel room there in Seattle for the three of them for the night. I went home, booked a ticket on the same flight, packed a bag and drove back to Seattle the next morning.

I went with them to Disney.

Edward and I started dating each other again, but only after I made him promise that he would never put me through that again. He agreed right away and said that he would never do that again because he didn’t want to lose us for good.

Eight months later, we were remarried in a small ceremony that the Justice of the Peace conducted and had a much bigger reception at his parent’s house later that afternoon. Never had I been happier than the moment we were once husband and wife again. Edward was so much more attentive of the kids and me after that. We even decided to take in a couple of foster kids and get a dog. Dylan and Brooklynn thankfully agreed on getting a golden retriever and were okay with kids coming to live with us.

The only downside to taking in foster kids was moving into another home. We had enough room for the four of us and a guest room in our house, but not much else. All of the packing and unpacking was a pain, especially during the school year, but if it meant that we could provide a couple of kids with a loving home, it was worth it.

There wasn’t a person in our family that objected to us being married again. In fact, everyone one was pushing us to take that step again. I didn’t mind one bit. I do have a feeling that my dad had a heart to heart with Edward before we did though. Esme was elated that her son was happy again, happier than he ever was. Carlisle was happy to have more grandkids to spoil. My dad was happy to have a few more fishing buddies. My mom was happy to know that I no longer had to wallow in self-hate and self-pity anymore. Alice, Jasper, Emmett and Rose were more than happy that things weren’t awkward for us anymore. The kids loved the dog (whom they named Sadie), having kids around to play with, and having their dad living with them again.

I was happy to have my family again.

I was happy to see my love more than every other weekend.