For those of you who are trying to keep up, here’s a quick recap, in a more conventional, linear-narrative format:
I got married once. It didn’t work out, but the failed effort did produce The Child.
I got married again, based on the usual promises (love, honor, cherish, etc.) and one slightly more specific one: We would have a child. I wanted one more.
For seven years, he found excuses and arguments and sudden new preconditions that had to be met … and the promise went unkept.
At age 42 I said, I want my baby: it’s now or never. We were beset by a series of sometimes inexplicable medical issues that kept me from my desired goal, not to mention increasingly expensive fertility treatments.
When my ovaries and the savings were completely exhausted, three days before the completion of an in-vitro fertilization procedure, he walked out on the flimsiest of pretexts.
In the 14 months that followed, he used the legal system to harrass me and force me to run up a pile of debt (exceeded, evidently, by an even larger pile of his own debt).
In the 14 months that followed, I held on to the idea that there was, somehow, a magical answer to my problems, signing up on match.com and meeting a strange array of people. If you’re thinking, “You know, dating isn’t really the obvious thing to do in such a situation,” you’re probably right. I couldn’t find a book or even a blog post titled “What To Do When Your Spouse Cancels The IVF Cycle That Was Your Last Hope.”
Yes, I looked. Google has the answer to many questions, but not that one, it turns out.
I distracted myself. I learned how to economize. I baked some things – according to my scale, a lot of things. I remembered I was actually a capable person who could do things for herself. I noticed that my child had grown up when I was paying attention to all this other stuff. Somewhere in there, my dog had a stroke and my cat died of cancer.
I cry sometimes, but I think not enough, or maybe not at the right time.
No, I have no idea where any of this is going. If I was the sort of person who could figure out where things were going, would I have ended up here in the first place?
