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“The Pill isn’t one hundred percent accurate, Alana,” Simon had told me when I’d come to him with the stick, with the tears, with the fears I had because I didn’t feel ready.
Because, at the time, I’d been considering finally leaving him. I went from practically living with him, to spending more time at my overcrowded apartment, a place I felt a little more free, less watched, less judged.
It wasn’t that Simon had been verbally abusive, but he’d gotten what I called “nit-picky” with me. Nothing I did ever seemed quite right.
I wasn’t the “most beautiful woman in the world” anymore. Suddenly, I would come out of the shower to him standing there, inspecting me, and he would ask if I had put on weight.
And I wasn’t quite so “mature for my age,” because he would get frustrated when I didn’t know something like which fork to use at a fancy setting or what the different types of wine meant flavor-wise.
Not world-ending, life-shattering stuff. But it was weighing on me. And I wasn’t as happy with the arrangement as I had once been.
And then… the pregnancy.
“I had no idea at the time that he’d screwed with my birth control,” I told Seth.
“Who the fuck would think that?” Seth shot back, face twisted up. “That’s beyond fucked up.”
Beyond fucked up.
That described the Simon I would grow to know pretty well, actually.
Simon got sweet again then.
Of course he did.
Because he was so, so close to getting what he wanted. Me under his thumb.
He was full of promises of how he was going to take care of the baby and me, how we would want for nothing.
I had to believe him.
Because there was no way I could provide and care for a baby on my own then.
I’d been so sick my first trimester, nonstop throwing up, and exhausted all the time.
“Move in here, so I can take care of you,” he’d demanded while stroking my hair in the bathroom where I practically lived.
So I did.
And he did.
For a while.
Then the nit-picking started again.
The sideways glances if I ate anything that wasn’t “good for” the baby. The demands to know why I was putting on so much weight, and why I was gaining it in places that weren’t my belly.
I was sent to a nutritionist.
I was on a diet while pregnant.
But I thought he knew better about these sorts of things. What the hell did I know about health and pregnancy?
There was a grace period after Isaac was born, when things were kind of soft and good.
Even if he did insist on my resuming my “wifely” duties sooner than the doctor said was safe. And that I still wasn’t his damn wife.
It was all… okay.
And I was so damned determined to be the best possible mom to Isaac, to give him all the love and attention and security that I hadn’t really known.
So that was my focus.
About four months following his birth, the nit-picking got worse.
Comments about why I hadn’t lost the baby weight, why I had so many “unsightly” stretch marks on my boobs. Why the house wasn’t as clean. Why I didn’t have myself all done up for him when he got home. And dinner cooked. And the laundry done.
I was just barely twenty-one with a newborn and very little idea of what I was doing. I thought I was managing pretty well, all things considered.
But Simon didn’t.
And when Simon wasn’t happy, no one was.
So I worked harder. I got myself pretty. I ate less. I put on creams. I did the housework and put together meals.
The more I ran myself ragged, the better things seemed to get.
And that was all I wanted for Isaac. A good family life. Though, yeah, Simon was kind of disinterested. I figured at first it was just because he was so small, and so very needy. And Simon was a busy man who didn’t have a lot of patience.
I imagined that as Isaac grew, Simon would get closer to him.
As it would turn out, he just got harder on him. More demanding of him. Even though he was just a baby still.
Why wasn’t he crawling yet? Or walking yet? Or talking yet? He needs to be further along than this. You need to work with him more.
“Then I got pregnant with Hazel,” I said, shaking my head at the memory. “Again, while I was supposedly on birth control.”
I felt like I was some medical miracle or freak or something.
Again, I was sick.
So, so sick.
Even worse, if my memory serves me right, than I had been with Isaac.
But gone was all the gentleness.
All I got were demands of why I was letting housework slide, even though I could barely be away from the toilet long enough to feed and change my son, let alone get anything else done.
