I was very afraid to share the good news about my future child with my husband. He was younger than me, all work and business trips. He was very busy and constantly growing in his career, so sometimes it seemed to me that he did not care about his family or even about me. We hadn’t talked about having children at the time, hadn’t planned, and it all came out of the blue.
We were living with my mother-in-law and her second husband at the time, and she found a positive test in the trash. She came to me with a serious conversation and carefully, with hints, began to explain that we were too young for children, that her Philip was not yet ready to become a father, he had work, big plans for the future, and a child could ruin everything, including our marriage. I was young, too, stupid. I thought, really, why would I have a baby at twenty-four? I didn’t even have any married friends to look at.
I listened to my mother-in-law, who had never given me any bad advice before. She even went to the clinic with me. While I was recovering and agonizing both physically and mentally, Philip didn’t even notice it. His aloofness and disinterest in me was killing me. That was the reason our marriage fell apart, not because of the baby.
At twenty-seven, I remarried. William was a wonderful man and dreamed of having a family. I was ready, too, I thought. We tried that, and then we went to the doctors and were told I couldn’t have children. A couple of years ago, the surgery was done poorly, which now made it impossible for me to get pregnant.
I tried to get treatment, shed tears, and blamed myself for falling for my mother-in-law’s persuasion. When I told her about the diagnosis over the phone, since we still had some kind of relationship with her after my divorce from Philip, she just said: “Be strong.”
She doesn’t feel guilty, she feels good. Of course, she already has a son, it’s my life that’s broken!
And if it hadn’t been for her brainwashing, I would have told Philip and who knows, maybe things would have turned out differently for me and him. Maybe I wouldn’t be married to William now, but at least I’d know the happiness of motherhood, and now I wouldn’t.
