Kia 🧸ྀི@xevekiah
I almost died giving birth to our daughter.
Forty-two hours of labor. Emergency C-section. I remember the cold of the operating room and the way the doctors wouldn’t meet my eyes. They said if we had waited another hour, one of us wouldn’t have made it.
I woke up stitched, shaking, numb from the chest down.
He didn’t hold my hand. He didn’t cry. He just asked the doctor if the scar would be “permanent.”
When we got home, I could barely walk. I couldn’t laugh without pain shooting through my stomach. I needed help sitting up. He complained that the house was messy. Said maternity leave wasn’t a vacation.
Two weeks postpartum, he stood over me while I was trying to latch the baby and said, “You know women are supposed to give birth naturally. My mom did.”
I thought he was joking.
He wasn’t.
One night I overheard him on the phone with his brother saying, “She didn’t even give birth properly. They just cut her open.”
Cut her open.
Like I wasn’t split in half to bring his child into this world.
When I finally looked at my scar in the mirror, still swollen and purple, I didn’t see weakness. I saw survival. But every time he looked at me, I saw disappointment.
Then it got worse.
He stopped touching me. Started going to the gym every night. Said he “needed a woman who takes care of herself.” I was still bleeding. Still leaking milk. Still waking up every two hours.
One evening he tossed a waist trainer onto the bed and said, “You should start fixing it before it’s too late.”
I asked him what “it” was.
He pointed at my stomach.
I slept in the nursery that night. Not because the baby cried. Because I did.
Now he tells people I’ve “changed” since having the baby. That I’m emotional. That I don’t try anymore.
I almost died. I gave him a daughter. I carry a scar that aches when it rains.
And somehow I’m the one who failed.
I don’t know who I married. I don’t know how to leave. But I know this can’t be what love looks like.
