The first month of motherhood wasn’t a glow; it was a blur of bodily fluids, stitches, and a level of exhaustion that felt like hallucinating.
I was in the trenches. I had just given birth to twins.
They were beautiful, but they were loud. They operated on a relay system: when one stopped screaming, the other began. I was operating on adrenaline and fear. My body was broken, and I hadn’t slept in weeks. I was recovering from a C-section, waddling around the house in mesh underwear, trying to keep two tiny humans alive.
My husband, Andrew, watched this chaos not with sympathy, but with irritation. He wore noise-canceling headphones to dinner. He sighed loudly every time a baby cried.
Then came the Friday evening that defined him.
I was nursing one baby and rocking the other with my foot. Andrew walked into the room with a packed suitcase. He looked fresh, showered, and annoyed.
“I’m leaving for a bit,” he announced.
“Leaving?” I asked, bleary-eyed. “For work?”
“No, for sleep,” he said, zipping his bag. “My husband told me he was moving into a hotel,” the words hanging in the air like a slap.
I stared at him. “You’re moving to a hotel? Andrew, I can’t do this alone. I can barely walk.”
“I have a presentation next week, Sarah,” he snapped. “The babies crying was ‘affecting his work performance.’“.
He framed his abandonment as a professional necessity. He acted as if our children were a jackhammer construction crew outside his window, rather than his own flesh and blood. He needed his REM sleep; I apparently did not.
He walked out. He left his recovering wife alone with two newborns so he could sleep on high-thread-count sheets and order room service.
I survived the next two weeks on instinct. I waited for him to call. I waited for him to say he was rested and coming home to take a shift.
The door never opened. He never moved back in.
Instead, on a Tuesday afternoon, my phone pinged. I was on the sofa, pillows propped everywhere, nursing both babies simultaneously. I reached for the phone with a trembling hand, expecting a text asking about the kids.
It was an email. From a law firm.
I opened the attachment. He served me divorce papers via email while I was breastfeeding.
I sat there, tethered to our children by biology and love, reading the legal declaration that he was done. He hadn’t just checked out of the house; he had checked out of the family. He chose his “work performance” over the hardest job in the world. As I looked down at the two sleeping faces against my chest, I realized he had done us a favor. He had removed the biggest baby from the house, leaving me with the only two that actually mattered.
