He looks at me and I know he pities me. I have so much to say, but none of the energy to say it. I can’t fight tonight, not about this. My stomach churns from the pills they gave me, leaving me nauseous and clutching my belly in bed. He rubs my back but I know he’s sick of it, he’s ready for things to go back to normal. He’s ready to have his wife back. The powerhouse of a wife, who meal prepped and paid the bills and cooked and cleaned (half-assedly, let’s be honest), bathed the baby and still worked a full-time job. She’s gone.
I don’t know if she’ll ever be back, honestly. It seems like such a long time since I’ve seen her. Since I’ve been her.
“You’re not even trying,” he says qui
etly, and I can tell that it pains him to say it, even though he doesn’t want to, he’s just as exhausted as I am and he doesn’t know what to do anymore. “Tell me how to fix it,” he pleads.
Oh I wish I knew.
And my relationships are all a shell of what they once were- friends have disappeared completely, check in once in awhile with a half hearted “hope you’re doing well,” pretend they don’t know what I’ve been going through, or simply don’t understand why I can’t just “be happier”.
The truth is, it’s takes everything I have to crawl out of bed in the morning, after nightmares all night and flashbacks of that November morning. Who would have known that 2020 was going to bring such a cluster of terrible things just a few months later.
But I look at my husband now, who has been by my side for 11 years, through laughter and death and childbirth, and he wants me to get better, deep in his bones, wants to fix me. But this one’s on me, and I know it.