“You are so bad,” Cynthia said. But she was laughing. “I’m strategic. My family needs to see what I was dealing with so they stop making me feel guilty about the divorce. Once they see Amanda at our baby shower looking broken and bitter while we’re celebrating our miracle baby, they’ll realize I made the right choice. Our miracle baby.
Austin was calling Cynthia’s pregnancy a miracle while calling her infertility a personal failing. What if she brings someone? Cynthia asked. Austin actually snorted. Bring someone. Cynthia look at her life. She has no friends, no career, no money, no prospects. She’s a 30-year-old woman whose entire identity was being my wife.
Who’s she going to bring? They went back inside, still laughing about their plan to use her as the entertainment at their baby shower. She sat in her car for another 20 minutes, letting the full scope of Austin’s cruelty sink in. He hadn’t just left her. He hadn’t just rewritten their history to make himself look better.
He was actively planning to destroy what was left of her reputation and dignity by parading her pain in front of everyone they’d known as a couple. Austin wanted her at that baby shower so people could see the crazy, bitter ex-wife compared to his new perfect family. He wanted her presence to justify every lie he told about their marriage, every cruel comment he’d made about her fertility, every way he’d painted her as the problem.
She drove home in a days, finally understanding that the man she’d loved for 8 years was not just indifferent to her pain. He was actively enjoying it. He was using her suffering as a tool to make himself look better. That night, she called her sister Maria for the first time since the divorce papers had arrived. Amanda, I’ve been wondering when you were going to call me back. I know.
I’m sorry. I’ve been dealing with a lot. How are you holding up with everything? She broke down and told her everything. The separation, the fertility test results Austin had hidden. Cynthia, the lies he told his family and finally what she’d overheard about the baby shower. Maria was quiet for a long time after she finished.
Amanda, she said finally, “That man is a sociopath. I think I might actually be crazy, Maria. He keeps making me feel like I imagined everything, like I was the problem. Like our marriage failed because I was obsessive and unstable.” You are not crazy. You are not unstable. You are a woman who was emotionally abused by a man who’s now trying to publicly humiliate you for his own entertainment.
But what if I was obsessive about getting pregnant? What if I did make our marriage all about fertility treatments? Amanda, listen to me. Even if you had been obsessive, even if you had made mistakes, that doesn’t justify what Austin did to you. Normal people don’t abandon their spouses during medical crisis. Normal people don’t cheat and then blame their partner.
Normal people don’t invite their ex-wife to a baby shower specifically to humiliate them. She started crying for the first time in weeks. And furthermore, Maria continued, Austin participated in every single fertility treatment. He was right there making those schedules, booking those appointments, tracking your cycles. He was just as invested in getting pregnant as you were.
