Someday Never Came

What hurts the most isn’t even the things you said to me. It’s the things you took away from me. Or maybe the things I allowed you to take away from me, because I’m trying really hard to stop pretending I had no part in staying.

Within the first six months of being with you, I remember telling someone, “I’m afraid that if I stay with him, none of my dreams will come true.”

That’s what I said. Eight years ago. And fuck, if that isn’t the hardest thing to sit with now.

Because I knew. I fucking knew.

My gut knew before I had all the reasons. Before I had eight and a half years of examples and explanations and excuses. Something inside of me knew exactly what staying was going to cost me, and I didn’t listen to it.

Instead, I listened to “I love you.”

I let those three words become louder than my gut. Louder than my head. Louder than that feeling in my stomach telling me that something wasn’t right. I kept thinking love meant we would eventually figure everything else out.

And what did I want? I wanted to be a wife. I wanted to be a mom. I wanted a family. That’s it. Those were my dreams. You knew that from the beginning.

And you let me believe those things were coming.

You joked about our future kids. You talked about “our kids someday.” You talked about a future with me like it was something we were actually building toward, when you knew it wasn’t going to happen.

That’s where so much of my anger comes from.

Because I think you knew that if you had looked at me and actually told me the truth, I would have left.

You knew how badly I wanted to be a mother. You knew that was probably the one thing I wouldn’t have compromised on. So instead, there was always a someday.

Someday just never came.

And then somehow you started telling other people stories about why we didn’t have kids. You told people we were having trouble conceiving. Last Halloween, when we met our neighbor for the first time and he asked if we had kids, I said no. And then you said something about how we were expecting once but lost it.

I remember just looking at you completely fucking baffled. Because that never happened. I was never pregnant. We never lost a baby.

But you said things like that enough that even your dad believed there was some fertility issue and offered to help pay for fertility treatments. And somewhere in all of that, I stopped questioning the insanity of it. It became another explanation for why the thing I wanted most still hadn’t happened.

But we weren’t struggling to have a baby. We weren’t trying. And that’s a really fucking painful difference.

Now people tell me, “It’s not too late.”

And I know they mean well. I do. But I’m going to be 38 in days, and I don’t need somebody to tell me what technically might still be possible. That’s not the point.

The point is that I had time. I had eight and a half years. And I can’t get them back.

I can’t go back to the woman six months into this relationship and shake her and tell her, “LISTEN TO YOURSELF. You already fucking know.”

Because she did. She knew exactly what she was afraid of.

She was afraid that loving you would mean giving up the life she wanted for herself. And she stayed anyway.

That’s the part I have to live with now. I have to figure out how to forgive myself for that. Because as angry as I am at you for letting me believe in a future you knew wasn’t coming, I’m angry at myself too.

I stopped trusting myself.

I thought loving someone meant believing in them when everyone else wouldn’t. I thought if someone was hurt, you loved them harder. You didn’t give up on them. You saw the good underneath all of the shit and reminded them it was there.

And I did believe in you. I still fucking believe in you.

But I sacrificed so much of myself believing in you that somewhere along the way I stopped believing in me.

So maybe that’s what I’m supposed to take from all of this. When your gut is screaming at you, fucking listen.

It doesn’t need eight and a half years of evidence. It doesn’t need to prove its case. It doesn’t need someone else to agree.

Because eight years ago, mine told me exactly what I was going to lose.

I just wish to God I had listened.