Are you listening?

He said, metaphorically, that he finally heard me once I screamed.

He wasn’t sure whether to feel lucky, or worried, when all the other guys complained that their wives just wouldn’t stop talking, and he had nothing to add to the conversation; that I never talked to him.

My response was:

Those who know me well, know that I don’t talk much. I process internally. I choose my words carefully. If and when I talk, I am laconic and mean what I say. I believe in the power of words, so the ones that come out of my mouth are not wielded as careless weapons. They do not escape like the steam of a pressure relief valve.

When I choose to speak, I speak with intent, and those who know me, know to listen, because my words are not empty.

So when he says I never talked to him he is obviously forgetting the time during IVF when I admitted that the process was hard, and he brushed it off with a sneer and venomous, “Your life isn’t hard.”

There were the times I came to him for reassurance when he was depressed, and it only drove him deeper into himself and his sense of inadequacy. He could not make space for the expression of my feelings or needs in the myopic darkness in which he was lost. If he couldn’t be my sunshine, I at least needed him to be a mirror to reflect my own sunshine back at me.

I told him over and over again through the cancer, the IVF, and the adoption process that I felt alone; that he was leaving me alone in all of this. Each time he scoffed that he was right there. I am so tired of feeling alone. If I am going to feel alone, I may as well actually be alone. Then, maybe, I won’t feel so lonely.

Finally, there were the many times I said over the last year and a half, “I can not keep doing this. I need more from you.”

None of my words are empty. So when I told him I wanted a divorce, that I did not want to be in this partnership with him anymore, I was sincere. I do not say drastic things as a cry to finally be taken seriously. If I am at the point of “screaming,” then I am past a point of no return.

His response was to, yet again, dismiss my words and write me off as simply being stubborn