“You wanted to be a mother,” he said.

“So act like one.”

I just stood there, staring at him, a baby on each shoulder, those words landing in the very center of me.

Because of everything, that was the cruelest thing he could have said, and he had chosen it precisely, whether he knew it or not. You wanted to be a mother. As though motherhood were a self-indulgent whim I had insisted upon over his objections, rather than a dream we had shared, and fought for, together, through six years I will describe later and would not wish on anyone. So act like one. As though my exhaustion were evidence that I was doing motherhood wrong, failing at the thing I had wanted, rather than evidence that I was doing it almost entirely alone.

He was using the children we had longed for as a weapon against me, framing my devotion to them as the reason I deserved no help, turning the deepest desire of my life into a stick to beat me with so that he could go drink beer on a boat.