Then he began arriving late.

Then he stopped coming at all.

And somewhere in there he had learned to turn each medical disappointment into a weapon — to make my grief his grievance, to speak of our struggle as a thing being done to him by my failing body.

His mother helped.

At a family dinner, within my hearing, she had observed that her son deserved “a house full of children, not a permanent waiting room.” I had sat at that table and said nothing, and gone home and believed her, because that is what those years had done to me: they had taught me to accept, as simple fact, that I was the thing that was wrong.

That is the part that is hardest to explain to anyone who has not lived inside it — how a competent, educated, self-respecting woman comes to believe such a thing about herself.

It does not happen all at once.

No one announces that you are broken; if they did, you could fight it.

It happens in a thousand small increments, each one deniable on its own.

A sigh in a waiting room.

A husband who checks his phone during the ultrasound.

A mother-in-law’s remark, delivered lightly enough that objecting would make you seem hysterical.

The slow shift in how a marriage talks about a problem — from our struggle to your condition, from we are having trouble to you cannot.

Each drop of it is small.