Sarah Bradley
“Why would I want to have a baby with YOU?”
I’ve forgiven or forgotten many of the things you said and did as our marriage slowly collapsed, but those words are burned into my memory as the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me.
Together, in the early days of marriage, we went through the confusion of not conceiving the baby we had taken for granted we would have. Together we hoped and believed and supported each other. We weren’t sad yet. We kept trying. The names were ready.
Then the tests. Separately, but together we did all the medical bits, read the books, listened to the advice. That time is all a bit of a blur and I’m glad I don’t remember most of it. I do remember that this was when I first thought “it isn’t meant to be like this.” Not sad yet; but worried.
Nothing worked and then we didn’t work anymore. Not suddenly but, undetected at first, distance, deceit, disappointment crept in. And as the doctors started to talk about IVF, you stopped talking.
I knew then. I knew what the silences and the absences meant. That knowledge was the beginning of the end. Clinging onto the dream of motherhood, I tried once more to draw you back to the possibility of trying again. I don’t remember how the conversation became an argument, but when it did, those dreadful words spat from your mouth.
“Why would I want to have a baby with YOU?”
We weren’t together anymore. I was on my own.
I don’t believe the “baby thing” was instrumental in the end of our togetherness; it just happened at the same time as you chose to behave like you weren’t married any more. Later, I asked you if you thought it was a factor. You said, “I wouldn’t have done those things if we had a baby.” The words of a coward - blaming our unborn child for your choices and inadequacies.
I’ll never know if IVF might have worked, or if we would’ve been a happy family. I suspect not. If I wasn’t enough for you, then you didn’t deserve to be the father of my child.
The answer to your poisonous question is “because I would have been a great Mum and because our children would have been beautiful.” Their names are in my heart.
