For years, I thought the worst thing my husband could do was make me feel ashamed of my own body.
I was wrong.
The truth came out at our twentieth-anniversary party, in front of everyone we knew.
Greg and I met when we were twenty-six. At the time, I still believed love was mostly a matter of timing and luck.
He was loud, charming and always surrounded by friends who slapped him on the shoulder whenever I walked into a room.
“You won the lottery,” they used to tell him.
Greg always smiled as though he completely agreed.
His only strange habit concerned food.
Greg watched my plate more closely than he watched his own.
The first time I went out to dinner with his friends, he joked, “A woman should always eat less than her man.”
Everyone laughed.
So did I.
When I reached for another roll, Greg raised one eyebrow.
“Saving room for dessert too?”
I laughed again because everyone else did.
But later that night, while I was washing my face, I replayed the comment in my head.
It sounded almost harmless.
Greg had been affectionate afterward, and I used that tenderness as evidence that I had misunderstood him.
I hadn’t.
I simply wasn’t ready to understand what was happening.
We married three years later.
During our wedding toast, his best friend raised his glass and said, “Keep feeding her compliments, man. You don’t want her realizing she can do better.”
Everyone laughed.
I laughed too.
Three years into our marriage, I became pregnant with our first child.
Pregnancy changed my body far more than I had expected.
But Greg said almost nothing about my weight during those months.
He brought me crackers when I felt sick and rubbed my feet at night.
For a while, I convinced myself that I had misjudged him.
Maybe marriage had made him gentler.
Maybe fatherhood had made him more mature.
Maybe he was finally secure enough not to care about things like that.
When Sophie was born, our lives changed overnight.
Bottles crowded the sink.
Laundry covered the chairs.
Someone always needed me.
Then Daniel arrived eighteen months later, and Lucy followed thirteen months after him.
By then, sleep came in scraps.
The house was never quiet.
Greg, however, slept through most nights.
Every morning, he would wake up rested and stroll through the house asking me to do things while I was already running on fumes.
