When my water broke in the middle of the night, there was no husband to frantically grab the hospital bag. I called a cab. I walked myself into the maternity ward. I labored for eighteen excruciating hours with only the nurses to wipe my forehead and tell me when to push. And when my son finally arrived—seven pounds, four ounces of screaming, perfect reality—I looked at his little face and felt a profound, overwhelming shift.
I didn’t miss my ex in that room. Actually, looking back, giving birth alone was the first great gift of my son’s life.
From day one, I realized something crucial: raising an infant is incredibly hard, but raising an infant while also managing a man-child who resents his own offspring is impossible. I was completely freed from his terrible help. I didn’t have to argue about whose turn it was to change a diaper. I didn’t have to deal with his passive-aggressive sighs when the baby cried during his favorite TV show. I didn’t have to manage his fragile ego or soothe his anxiety about not being the center of attention anymore.
I was the captain of the ship, and the waters were entirely under my control. Over the next twelve years, I poured every ounce of my energy, love, and ambition into that boy. And let me brag for a moment, because I earned the right to: I flawlessly raised an incredibly brilliant child.
My son is a marvel. By the time he was four, he was reading chapter books. By eight, he was taking apart old radios and putting them back together just to see how the circuits worked. More importantly, he is kind. He holds doors for elderly women at the grocery store, he stands up for bullied kids at his middle school, and he has an emotional maturity that most grown men—his father included—completely lack. We have a peaceful, joyous, rock-solid little life. We built our own family, just the two of us, and it is a masterpiece.
During those four thousand, three hundred, and eighty days, I did not hear a single peep from my ex. No birthday cards. No awkward phone calls. Not a single, solitary dime of child support. He vanished into the ether to “find himself,” completely unburdened by the massive fatherly responsibility he had run away from.
