A few days after we settled in at home, I posted a candid picture of Leo sitting on the living room couch holding his tiny sister in his arms. He looked simultaneously terrified of dropping her and bursting with pride. Friends commented, co-workers from the clinic commented, even old high school acquaintances sent kind messages. My mother didn't react at all. That deafening silence ended up bothering me far more than her angry, passive aggressive comments ever had.
Then about 3 weeks postpartum, an old mutual friend named Sarah contacted me. Sarah had known both Chloe and me since we were in middle school, but after the messy divorce, she had naturally drifted and stayed much closer to Chloe. I didn't hold that against her. People naturally pick whatever social path creates the least amount of friction, and staying neutral around two sisters whose relationship imploded over infidelity is basically impossible.
Sarah's message was vague and slightly frantic. She asked whether I could please meet her for coffee sometime soon because there was something major she thought I absolutely needed to know. My first instinct was a hard no. I had a newborn who wasn't sleeping through the night.
I was physically exhausted. My hormones were all over the place. And historically, every single time someone in my orbit said, "There's something you should know," my life exponentially got worse. But morbid curiosity is one of my fatal flaws. So, a couple of weeks later, I left pumped milk in the fridge, left Marcus with the baby, and drove to a Panera Bread to meet Sarah during her lunch break.
Sarah looked nervous. She bought my coffee, sat down across from me, fidgeted with her napkin for 2 minutes, and then finally dropped a nuclear bomb. She told me that Chloe had recently learned a horrifying truth about my ex-husband, Greg. Apparently, Chloe and Greg had been fighting viciously for months about their stalled fertility treatments.
Chloe had spent years, literal years, believing she was the broken one because of her irregular cycles. She had willingly subjected her body to invasive appointments, painful diagnostic tests, hormone injections that made her crazy, obsessive daily cycle tracking, all of it. The entire medical and emotional burden had rested solely on her shoulders. Whenever the subject of testing him came up, Greg aggressively pushed it off, gaslighting her by smugly pointing out that he had already fathered Leo, so clearly his sperm was perfectly fine.
During a particularly ugly screaming argument where Chloe accused him of not caring enough to figure out what was wrong with them, Greg finally snapped. He yelled at her that there was nothing to figure out. He had secretly gotten a vasectomy not long after our son Leo was born.
I stopped breathing. The bustling noise of the Panera Bread completely faded out. I stared at Sarah, certain I had misheard her. "Wait, before our divorce?" Sarah gave a grim, miserable nod.
"Yes, while you were still married." I sat back in the hard wooden chair and just stared at her face. My first reaction wasn't even anger. It was total blank confusion. Greg had never told me.
During our marriage, we had actively talked about maybe having another child someday. Not immediately, because I had been exhausted and overwhelmed with a toddler, but we had agreed on someday. Apparently, while I was recovering from childirth and desperately trying to figure out how to be a good mother, my husband had quietly, unilaterally decided there would never be another baby with me. Went to a clinic, got snipped, and never once thought his own wife deserved to know about a permanent change to our reproductive future.