My husband had twins with my best friend. I signed the divorce papers without a word. Then he went to his mother’s house, and she went white and said, “She still hasn’t told you about that?”
He was nineteen. He was in a consulting room with his mother — the report is addressed to him at her house and there are two names in the letter — and he was told, at nineteen, that he could not father a child, and it was irreversible, and there was no ambiguity in the language.
We married in 2013.
We tried from 2013 to 2016.
Two and a half years.
Two and a half years in which I charted my temperature every morning, took my basal readings at six, had a hysterosalpingogram in 2014 that I will not describe, had a uterine septum resected in 2015, and spent about eleven thousand dollars of my own money on tests of my own body.
Two and a half years in which I apologised to that man. Repeatedly. In a kitchen, in a car, on a Christmas Eve in 2015 when I could not stop.
And the whole time, there was a piece of paper from 2002 in a box at his mother’s house.
He sat opposite me in a consulting room in June of 2016 and received news he had already had for fourteen years, and he cried, and I held his hand and told him it did not matter and that we would find a way.
That is the thing I cannot get past and it is not the twins and it is not the money.
