In the early days, our relationship was luminous, almost feverishly bright with attention and agreement and what I understood then as love—its intensity, its precision, the way it seemed to reach for every part of me, even the parts I kept hidden, even the ones I feared were too strange or fragile to show. I had spent so much of my life being told I was wrong about my own experience—too sensitive, too serious, too sure—and here was someone who seemed to believe me, who mirrored my convictions and cradled my flaws. When he looked at me, I felt solid, central, even beloved.
Later, I would learn that this phase had a name—love bombing—but at the time it felt like safety, like sanctuary, like being gathered after years of splintering. I believed I had found someone who would walk beside me as I built the kind of family I never had, a partner who would co-create a home filled with gentleness, who would meet parenthood with the same fire and devotion we had shown one another.
I imagined a daughter, just one, and I imagined that raising her would be the great work of my life—exhausting but luminous, exhausting but worth it. But then, of course, came the twins, and the sudden doubling of every demand, and the quiet panic that rose behind my eyes as I registered his reaction at the ultrasound: the blood drained from his face, his jaw tensed, his body shuddered with a knowing I had not yet accessed, a knowing that this was going to be unimaginably hard.
The beginning of erasure
In the early months, as our babies needed us constantly—feedings that blurred into one another, appointments, specialists, hospital visits, diapers and medications and developmental uncertainty—I began to disappear. At first it was just that I didn’t sleep or shower, that I was sticky with milk and crusted with spit-up and wore the same threadbare shirt three days in a row, and he began to speak to me with disappointment curling at the edges. I had always been earnest, always over-prepared, always striving—and now, even when I was doing everything, it was never the right thing.
I was scolded for not tightening a diaper, for forgetting to close a container, for not liking the same TV shows and wincing at their violence, for failing to stroke his hair at night the way I used to when we had more time. I was failing to be a wife, and a mother, and myself, and I was tired beyond any tiredness I had known before. I began to doubt even my smallest instincts.
His disappointment was total—it seeped into every moment. I had changed. I was no longer the bright, sharp person he had once found magnetic. I had become inconvenient. And yet I was also the same—still yearning, still toiling, still trying to prove that I was good. I was trying to keep all the pieces of our lives intact, but my failure to maintain performance had made me unbearable to him.
The old nausea of being disbelieved
There was a familiarity to the nausea I felt then—this sense of internal truth being overridden by someone else’s certainty. As a child, my experience had so often been invalidated. Lights were too bright, sounds too sharp, sensations too intense—and yet I was told they were fine, ordinary, tolerable. That I was too much. That I was wrong. I learned early to surrender my perception, to suppress what I knew in my body in order to be acceptable.
So when he began to rewrite the narrative of our family—when he suggested that my son’s struggles were my fault, that the difficulty we were facing was evidence of my defectiveness—it was almost unsurprising. It was like the familiar sensation of my truth sliding away, of being undone by another’s voice. And this time, his voice was one that doctors listened to.
I remember sitting in the psychiatrist’s office and telling the story of our children—the trauma at daycare, the early signs of distress, the long waitlists, the fears that kept me awake at night. I spoke clearly, calmly, ready to collaborate. He sat beside me and nodded, contributing little, offering no contradictions. I believed we were in agreement. That we were advocating together.
But later, after the report came back, the psychiatrist revealed that he had contacted her separately to say he believed our children had an attachment disorder. That was the moment everything inside me began to shake. He had gone behind my back to accuse me of emotionally damaging our children. He had decided that our son’s autism was a fiction, that what we were seeing instead was the aftermath of my failure to parent. My failure to be pleasant. My failure to die quietly instead of needing rest.
I had gone upstairs to sleep for a few nights when the twins were babies because I had started hearing things, seeing things, because I was so sleep-deprived and suicidal that I was becoming dangerous to myself—and somehow that act of survival had become the centrepiece of his indictment.
He would have preferred that I died than left the room.
The distortion of character
I am grateful that the psychiatrist rejected his assessment, that she saw the falseness in his claim and the tenderness in our family. But something inside me ruptured that day. I could no longer pretend we were a team. I could no longer imagine he believed in me.
Still, I tried. Still, I endured. We remained together for some time, but the mask of shared purpose had crumbled. And as our children began school, the pattern deepened—meeting after meeting, where I prepared the documents, requested the supports, booked the specialists, and sat in rooms full of professionals trying to explain the intricate shape of our child’s needs. And in each of those rooms, just when we reached a turning point, just when I believed we might finally be heard, he would strike.
It always came in the form of a casual cruelty—a comment that disregarded the children’s experience and framed my advocacy as unnecessary. Something that made me seem to be making mountains out of molehills. And the professionals would pause, and nod, and adjust their perception.
And I would want to disappear. Because I knew what they were thinking. How pathetic. She married someone like that.
But what they didn’t see was how strategic his betrayal was, how deeply familiar the cadence of that discrediting had become. What they didn’t know was that I was living in a story constantly being edited by someone else’s pen.
The legacy for my children
Now we are divorced. Now we live in separate homes. But the harm did not stop with the separation. Because co-parenting under these conditions means that the manipulation continues—just with more distance, and fewer witnesses. And now, heartbreakingly, my children see it too.
In recent meetings, he has said things so cruel, so undermining, so vividly dishonest, that I have physically recoiled. And my children, who are now old enough to be present, hear those words too. And they know.
They know what it feels like to be disbelieved. They know what it feels like to be loved by someone who cannot acknowledge their truth. They know what it means to be gaslit. And there is almost nothing I can do to protect them from that.
I have kept the peace for so long. I have smiled politely. I have stayed neutral. I have spoken kindly of him in their presence. I have done all the things I was told to do—to make sure my children didn’t feel torn in two. I have borne that weight alone, and I have done so with discipline, not because it felt fair, but because it felt necessary.
But I feel a shift coming, toward something more honest, as their eyes narrow when he speaks. He’s building his own story and I am reclaiming mine.
