I wrote this as a 20 minute exercise in my writers’ group. The prompt was: “a time you realized the difference between fantasy and reality.”
The baby is crying. I’m alone in the house, but I’m not. I haven’t showered in three days and I’ve barely slept. I’m starving. Husband is sleep. Still. Now. Always. I pick up the baby. I walk and rock to the kitchen, trying to calm him with one hand and microwave myself a lasagna with the other.
Take care of the baby.
Five minutes and thirty seconds of rocking and staring into space, eyes bleary. The microwave timer beeps. I sit with the Boppy pillow around my waist, breastfeeding while I eat my lasagna, and it dawns on me that I am married, my husband is in the next room, but I am alone.
Just take care of the baby.
The perception I’ve had all these years of our relationship was a fantasy I could not let go of. He wasn’t sarcastic. He was cruel. He wasn’t adoring me. He was using me. He didn’t want me. He tolerated me. and now we are not a happy family. I am a single, though married, mother.
Take care of the baby.
What do I do? I want to run away from my husband. Fleetingly, the thought of running away from my husband and child passes through my mind, and my own thought so terrifies me that my entire body gets hot and starts to buzz and that heat moves all the way down into my fingers. I take my hot finger tips and use them to massage my baby’s head, trying to transmit the love in my heart to the brain of my three-day-old baby.
I will never leave my son, but should I leave my husband? Where would I go? What would I do? How would I manage? Who would I be? What should I do?
Take care of the baby.
Ok, HH, I know it’s ‘fiction’ but we also know it’s damn close to the truth. I can relate. Believe me, I can relate. What really gets me is the ’3 day old baby’. THREE DAYS? It usually takes three months before the father completely removes himself. That’s just incredibly sad. For everyone.
OK, Contance, I do feel, to be fair, I need to clarify. Although, as you say, this is fiction, we both know it’s based on reality.
Just so you know, I don’t have a single complaint about husband as a father. It took him about six months to acclimate, but today he is as loving and dedicated to our little one as I am, and I don’t say that lightly.
Thank you for your comment. I’m so glad someone’s reading this stuff here!
♥, HH