Sebastian
Thank God I didn’t have your baby— you would’ve left me looking crazy, triggering me at every turn, making me wonder: will I ever be okay?
Men like you never understand a woman’s body, the toll it takes— the sickness, the heartburn, the hair thinning, teeth aching, skin shifting, the blood pressure rising like a tide. And that’s just the first trimester.
While I would’ve been at home, palming the small swell of my belly, you would’ve been chasing pleasure in someone else’s bed.
You don’t know what stress does to a womb— how panic, anxiety, depression echo inside, how a baby feels the storms its mother weathers. But you never cared. You only thought of you.
Tell me— did you even cry when I went under? Did you whisper goodbye? Or were you already planning your next night, your next woman, your next escape?
While I lay in bed, weak and bleeding, trying to process what was taken from me— a tiny heartbeat, 210 beats per minute at six weeks, a possibility, a maybe. I imagined names, dreamed of inspiration.
Then silence. Fetal heart rate: zero. No return. No future. No mini-me.
I grieved alone. Migraines. Cramping. Medication. Still dragging myself to work, still holding the weight of what was and wasn’t.
But even through tears, I smile. Because I will never have to look at a child and say: You are just like your father.
Your father— a man with a sweet tooth for empty pleasures, chasing finer things instead of building a home. Your father— a man who could not dream beyond himself.
So maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
And one day, when love is whole and steady,
when a partner stands beside me,
when a child is born from trust instead of grief,
I will hold them close and say:
Thank God—
you did not inherit my pain.
You are free to be more than me