After the birth of our second child, I felt the world was against me. I couldn’t sleep at night though the baby slept like a baby. I would get up in the morning and feel like the world had stolen something from me—my sleep. While I tossed and turned, my husband was sleeping soundly and snoring feebly like he was having a giggle with someone in his dream. I hated him for that.

Not only that, all of a sudden I hated the fact that he was a man and I was a woman. “Look at him,” I would tell myself. “What does he even bring to this marriage? I’ve carried two babies who changed me. What has he done around here lately?”

He walked around minding his business and I would pick up a fight with him just so I could tell him what he wasn’t doing. “You don’t help with the children. What kind of man are you?”

The baby would cry and he would be the first to reach out to him. “Don’t touch him. Don’t come and break him into pieces for me. Do you even know how to carry a baby?”

I will carefully and slowly take the baby out of his arms while he watches in disbelief. He came from work and dared to ask for his food. I screamed, “Do I have four arms to be doing everything in this house? Don’t ask me about food. You know where the kitchen is. You know what to cut and what to boil. Do something for yourself for once.”

One night after a scenario like that he smiled while I was boiling with anger. He said, “You need help. I don’t know what has come over you but you need to speak to someone because clearly, you don’t want to speak to me.”

My mom came to visit the following day. It was my husband who called her in.

I couldn’t disrespect my husband in front of my mom so I had to internalize the anger and the pain his existence brought to me. He asked me, “Do you need me to go away for a while? Because, obviously, you don’t want to see me around here.”

“Go wherever you want to and never come back,” I responded.

He left for work and I felt he wasn’t coming back home again. Usually, he was home at 6pm but that day, around 7pm he wasn’t home. I texted, “Your food is getting cold. Are you coming?” I followed it up with a call. I asked my mom to also call him. He didn’t pick up. The end of my marriage flashed through my eyes and it wasn’t pretty. Just when I was about to call his mom to ask about him, he appeared. I sighed.

While he was away and I was worried, I did a little bit of reading on my issues on Google. Every article suggested it could be postpartum depression. I knew what that was but I didn’t think it would manifest itself in me the way it did. I told my husband, “I know how you feel. Forgive me. I will start working on myself.”

So I started therapy. My husband was invited to some of the sessions. I watched him talk about his frustrations with me and my heart melted into a mould of submission; “Why didn’t he leave me? Why didn’t he fight back? He loves me that much?”

Our therapist turned to me and said, “You have a man who understands. It makes your recovery very easy.”

This is a testimonial story to the wonderful man I have in my life. I may not be able to say all this to him so I will let him read it when the story is published. For doing this life with me, I love you so much T.E.D

— Sandra

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