He smiled faintly.
“You’re still keeping that?”
I shrugged.
“It reminds me of something.”
“What?”
“The night I stopped begging.”
He became serious.
“I don’t ever want you to feel like that again.”
I looked at him.
“Then don’t make me.”
A Different Kind of Family
Our marriage didn’t magically become perfect.
There were still arguments.
There were still sleepless nights.
There were days when one baby cried while another needed feeding and the third needed changing.
There were moments when both of us were overwhelmed.
But something had changed.
Ethan started showing up.
Not occasionally.
Not when it was convenient.
He learned the feeding schedule.
He learned how to calm each baby.
He began taking nighttime shifts.
He started asking me a simple question that I had desperately needed to hear months earlier:
“What do you need?”
Sometimes my answer was sleep.
Sometimes it was food.
Sometimes it was ten minutes alone.