When Harry was born, I was sucked into a world of nothing but guilt and grief. I felt so alone and so lost.
There was only one person I turned to to help me through it, to guide me when I didn't have the strength (either literally or metaphorically) to put one foot in front of the other. My Mum.
She was an incredible support to me but in hindsight, she wasn't the person I needed to lean on. That was my husband Mark.
But I was convinced that he blamed me. After all, I blamed myself for bringing our half faced baby into the world, so it made perfect sense to me that he would be silently seething about the life I had robbed him of too.
So I stayed quiet.
I cried alone in the dark during the night feeds or when Mark was at work. When he was home, we talked about our day (I gave edited highlights) and we chatted with sometimes a clinical detachment about the various appointments, assessments and specialists who were seeing Harry.
I never talked to him about how sad I felt that our lives had changed. I never shared that I felt broken and didn't know if I would ever be the same again. I never explained that I was terrified of an uncertain future.
And because of that, I never found out that he felt exactly the same.
In fact, it was almost ten years after we separated, on a car journey home from one of Harrys hospital appointments that we talked and Mark was stunned to hear how I had felt, reassuring me that he had never ever blamed me and that he had always known I was a great Mum to both of our boys.
Would things have been different if we had spoken? I don't think so but as much as we are both very happy with our new partners and lives, sometimes I wish I had been kinder to him and to myself and allowed myself to drop the pretence of 'coping' like a machine on autopilot.
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