My hubby married my mum
fairytale wedding – I had my dream dress and Paul was showering me with compliments.”
Lauren, 34, added: “I must have been young and naive as I thought everything was going well.
“He told me that he wanted to be with me for ever.”
The couple went on a week-long honeymoon to Devon – and gratefully took Julie with them.
But within two months, that family harmony was painfully blown apart.
BUMP
And if losing her husband had been hard, Lauren had worse still to endure.
Just weeks after hearing rumours that Paul and Julie were now living together, she saw her mother walking down the street, apparently pregnant.
Lauren said: “When I saw her in the street and noticed she had a bump, my mind raced. She clutched her stomach and told me, ‘It’s a cyst’. I felt so sick, I went home and destroyed all the photos of our wedding.”
She also set about getting a divorce and rebuilding her life.
In July 2005 – nine months after Paul had walked out – Lauren’s mum Julie had his baby.
Lauren was unable to resist one last jibe. She admitted: “I texted her to say ‘Removed the cyst then?’
“She tried to claim the father was another boyfriend but I knew the truth. Paul and Mum officially announced themselves as a couple that summer and my world crumbled.”
Five years after his marriage to Lauren, Paul was taking his wedding vows again with Julie.
And that was a new anguish for heartbroken Lauren – who bravely attended for the sake of her daughter.
It followed a painstaking attempt to rebuild bridges with her mother. Lauren said: “She initiated it. I dropped my brother off at her house and she got in my car, started crying and just said, ‘I’m sorry’.
“I told her, ‘Get out of my car’. She wrote me a letter a couple of weeks later apologising.
“And that was the start of us mending our relationship.”
That was in 2006. Unsurprisingly, Lauren still finds it hard. She said: “We’d get on all right, have a massive falling out, and then get on again.
“I still bring it up and make a comment and she doesn’t like it.
“Just because we spoke after doesn’t mean I’m over it. Paul never said sorry or tried to apologise to me.
“I speak to him as he’s married to my mum. I’ve asked him before to explain to our daughter and he just says it’s forgotten about now.”
When Julie decided to marry Paul, she wanted her daughter close by. Lauren said: “She rang me up and invited me. It was awkward. I got married on the 14th August 2004, they married on the 15th August 2009.
“It was almost too much to bear but I did it for my daughter.
“I went to watch Mum marry the same man I’d wed five years earlier.
“As they exchanged vows it was hard not to think of the day Paul had said the same words to me, when Mum had stood alongside me, the proud mother of the bride.”
A decade on from that second wedding, Lauren is philosophical about how her relationship fell apart.
She still has infrequent contact with her mother, who works in child services and who remains married to her former son-in-law.
Lauren herself has managed to move on and has recently found a new partner. She is now happily pregnant with her fourth child.
But she admits her path has not been easy. She said: “What’s happened still has an impact on me, and on any relationship I’ve had.
“It’s going to give me trust issues for the rest of my life.
“Time is a great healer, and Mum and I have tried to have a normal relationship. But we will never be as close as we were – and I’ll never fully trust her again.”
Speaking from the home she shares with Paul, Julie, 53, told us: “We are married. We didn’t have an affair. We are married and that’s it.” Paul, now 35, declined to comment.