For two years, we tried to build a family. What we didn’t know was that the real threat wasn’t infertility — it was pressure disguised as love. And when my parents gave me a choice, I made the wrong one.
The first time my mother said it out loud, she didn’t even lower her voice.
“You’re wasting your life,” she told me at the kitchen table, stirring her tea like she was discussing the weather. “A woman deserves a family.
And you’ll never get one with him.”
I remember how the spoon clinked against the porcelain, rhythmic and sharp, like a countdown to something breaking. I blinked.
“Excuse me?”
She didn’t even flinch; her eyes, steely and composed, met mine across the table.
“You heard me. You’re 34. You’ve wasted two years chasing something that isn’t going to happen.
At what point do you admit it’s his fault?”
And yet, through it all, Ethan never blamed me, not once.
“We’re a family already,” he’d say, holding me while I cried into his chest. “A child would be a blessing, not a requirement.”
He meant it.
I could see it in his eyes every time he kissed the top of my head, every time he held me through another round of bad news. But my parents had their own story, and they clung to it like gospel: it wasn’t me.
“You’re healthy.
You’ve always been healthy,” my mother insisted. “If you had married a real man, you’d have a child by now.”
“I love him,” I said quietly. “Well, love won’t give me grandchildren,” she snapped.
I should have walked out then.
Should have stood up, told them to go to hell, and left with my head high, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat there in stunned silence while the people who raised me dismantled my life like they were fixing a broken appliance.
“You need to think about your future,” my father said. “A woman without children has nothing to show for her life.”
Nothing.
That word clung to me like smoke.
At first, my parents wore their concerns like a mask. “He’s the problem,” my mother started saying, as casually as if she were diagnosing a cold. “It’s simple biology.
If you were with someone else, you’d already have a baby by now.”
My father, less theatrical but just as brutal, took a different angle.
“He’s selfish,” he muttered one night over dinner, stabbing at his food without looking up. “He’s stealing your future.
Your right to be a mother.”
Ethan sat across from them, silent, shoulders rigid; he didn’t respond. But I saw the way his jaw tightened with every word.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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