My name is Delia Winslow, and I had been a mother for less than a day when the man who spent five years convincing me my body was broken called to humiliate me one last time.
It was barely seven in the morning in the maternity wing of Cascade Medical Center.
I had not slept.
My hair was scraped back into a knot, my back ached, my whole body felt wrung out, and in the clear bassinet beside me my daughter breathed her small even breaths, and none of it felt real yet.
For five years before that morning, I had endured fertility treatments, and two miscarriages, and a battery of tests that measured every inch of me and always seemed to find me wanting.
At the beginning, Damon had come to the appointments.
Then he began arriving late.
Then he stopped coming at all.
And somewhere in there he had learned to turn each medical disappointment into a weapon — to make my grief his grievance, to speak of our struggle as a thing being done to him by my failing body.
His mother helped.
At a family dinner, within my hearing, she had observed that her son deserved “a house full of children, not a permanent waiting room.” I had sat at that table and said nothing, and gone home and believed her, because that is what those years had done to me: they had taught me to accept, as simple fact, that I was the thing that was wrong.
That is the part that is hardest to explain to anyone who has not lived inside it — how a competent, educated, self-respecting woman comes to believe such a thing about herself.
It does not happen all at once.
No one announces that you are broken; if they did, you could fight it.
It happens in a thousand small increments, each one deniable on its own.
A sigh in a waiting room.
A husband who checks his phone during the ultrasound.
A mother-in-law’s remark, delivered lightly enough that objecting would make you seem hysterical.
The slow shift in how a marriage talks about a problem — from our struggle to your condition, from we are having trouble to you cannot.
Each drop of it is small.
But they pool.
And after five years of that steady, patient redirection of blame, I had absorbed a belief so completely that it no longer felt like a belief at all; it felt like a fact about the weather.
My body was broken.
My body had failed us.
My body was the reason for the grief in that house.
I had stopped even resenting it, which is the most defeated a person can be — I had simply accepted my own brokenness as the settled background of my life.
And the cruelest thing about it, the thing I understood only much later, holding a healthy sleeping daughter that my supposedly broken body had made, was that none of it had ever been true.
My body worked.
It had worked all along.
What had actually been broken in that marriage was never once in me.
Chapter 3 — The Assistant
