This is part of an ongoing series. Start with Part 1.
March 9th, 2023.
Four days before my due date.
We had been bickering via text until almost 3am. He kept saying he was going to come to bed. I kept saying I was sick of being woken up at 4am when I had to be up at 6am for work. I'd had a work-from-home job since October 2022. He made that nearly impossible too.
I remember being half asleep. Exhausted in the specific way that comes from growing a person while your body is also fighting itself. I'd had SPD since week ten — symphysis pubis dysfunction, a separation of the pelvic joint that made every step feel like something tearing — and by now I was moving through the world in a kind of managed pain that made sleep the only real relief.
I heard him in the next room. What had been my home office and spare room was now the nursery for my daughter. I didn't think much of it. I was too tired to think much of anything.
I went back to sleep.
I don't remember what he was upset about when he woke up. I'm not sure it matters — by that point the specific reason rarely did. He woke up in a mood, and the mood needed somewhere to go, and I was there.
It was the laundry. I had dried something he didn't want dried. That was enough.
He called me a dumb fuck. Other names after that — invalid, retard, the rotating cast of words he kept for occasions like this. I had stopped logging them a long time ago. They all blurred into the same sound eventually. The one that just meant you are less than.
I tried to leave.
He yanked me by my hair and shoved me into the wall.
Then he took my car keys, my wallet, my phone, my laptop, and my work laptop. I told him I would report it stolen. He was preventing me from being able to work. I was nearly forty weeks pregnant and he had just taken everything I needed to function.
So I grabbed my spare keys. My old wi-fi phone — the one I'd had when we first met. And then I grabbed his phone. He'd left it on the entry table.
And I ran out the door.
I don't remember much about where I went or how long I was gone. But I do remember hooking his phone up to my car. Funny thing about Android Auto. I went through every single name, every number. Wrote them all down on paper.
I know I came back. I always came back. That's the thing nobody tells you about being that deep in it — leaving isn't a single decision you make once. It's a thousand small decisions that all somehow lead back to the same door.
He came back too, at some point.
I went into the nursery and noticed it was...off. Then I noticed the abacus was gone.
It was a pastel rainbow one I'd found at Hobby Lobby — the kind of thing that looks simple but catches the light in a way that makes a room feel alive. I'd set it on a shelf next to some photos, above the makeshift changing table. It was a dresser I'd repurposed — a changing pad on top, a small lamp, a wipes warmer, and a basket of bows. I stood there for a moment looking at the empty space where it had been.
Then I noticed the K's.
I'd found two decorative letters — one marble, one gold — and arranged them on another shelf next to a framed ultrasound and a little sign with my daughter's name and a coming soon. They were gone.
Then the cards. I had displayed the baby shower cards along a little ledge — people's handwriting, people's words, people's names. Gone.
I started moving through the room faster then. The clothes I had organized and hung by size — newborn through six months, all somehow in the same soft color palette even though no one had coordinated — gone. The framed bible verse on glass. Gone. The large canvas print with 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 — you know the one. Love is patient, love is kind. Gone. The homemade blanket my sister had knitted, stitch by stitch, for a baby she hadn't met yet. The diapers, the pacifiers, the bibs, the swaddles, the muslin blankets. The samples of products I'd been collecting for months.
Gone.
I kept asking him.
What happened to the rainbow abacus?
Where's the marble K? The gold one?
Where are the clothes?
He stopped responding. Then, quietly, after a long silence:
"If I tell you will you promise not to get mad?"
I looked at him.
"You threw it all away didn't you."
Not a question.
He had gone through the nursery and decided he didn't like my decor. So he threw it away. The clothes, the cards, the letters, the art — into a trash bag, into the dumpster.
A room that had taken me a month to build. A month of moving through SPD pain and pregnancy fog and a depression so heavy that at twenty-six weeks I had told my doctor I didn't want to be pregnant anymore. I had still built her a room. I had still found the motivation, somehow, to assemble the crib — one my brother had helped me bring up from Goodwill, mid-century modern style, exactly what I'd wanted — to fold the clothes and hang the art and make it beautiful for a daughter I hadn't met yet.
He threw it in the dumpster because he didn't like the aesthetic.
On the same day he grabbed me by the hair and shoved me into a wall.
When he saw how gutted I was, he kept giving me those sad eyes. Something he had perfected. The look of looking sincere. He kept saying I'm sorry, I'll replace it, I'm so sorry. Kept trying to hug me while I cried. And I let him, because I was nearly forty weeks pregnant and I didn't have anything left to fight with.
Then he went to retrieve the bag. From the dumpster.
He came back with two huge bags — the clothes, some of the smaller things. But not the decor. That was gone. He hadn't liked it, he said. He said it quietly, like that was a reasonable explanation. Like his taste was a justification.
Then he took me to Hobby Lobby to replace some of it.
He complained the whole time about the cost of the abacus.
Thirty dollars. He'd grabbed me by the hair, thrown away a month of work, a handmade blanket, cards written by people who loved us — and he stood in Hobby Lobby complaining about thirty dollars.
I stood next to him and said nothing.
Some things you can't replace. He knew that. I think that's why he chose them.
The other ultrasounds hadn't survived him either. Earlier in the pregnancy he had ripped them up in front of me, one by one. But the framed one on the nursery wall — he'd never seen that one. He didn't know it was there.
It's the only one that made it through.
Not because I protected it. Just because he was never around long enough to know to look for it.
Three days later, my daughter was born.
Part 12 — The Birth, coming next.
If you've ever had to rebuild something with shaking hands while the person who destroyed it stood there waiting to be thanked for helping — you are not alone.
That's not remorse. That's management.