I’m a private teacher and had to go back to work online just two weeks after giving birth so we could make ends meet. It was brutal. Every single night. I work at night to match my students’ time zones, which means my day starts when everyone else is settling down. It was 10:45 p.m., and I was nursing our baby, trying to get him to sleep before my 11 p.m. lesson. His tiny hand curled around my finger. My heart ached with love, and with exhaustion. My husband walked out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist, getting ready for bed.
“Just ten more minutes, baby. Almost asleep,” I whispered, not just to our son, but to myself, a desperate plea for a moment of peace.
I looked up at him, a silent reminder that my shift was about to start. His eyes narrowed.
“MY BEDTIME IS 23:00,” he snapped, his voice sharp enough to make me flinch. “IF THE BABY WAKES UP, THAT’S YOUR PROBLEM TO SOLVE!”
I just stood there, frozen. My arms still cradling our son, my mind reeling. Too exhausted, too stunned to even respond. The man who stood before me, so cold, so utterly dismissive of my pain, of our child… This was the same man who had begged for a baby for years? The same man who had convinced me we were ready, that he wanted nothing more than to be a father?
The silence in the room stretched, thick and suffocating. Then, the door creaked open, and my mother-in-law walked in. She’d been staying with us “to help,” though her help often felt more like observation. She must have heard him. Her gaze flickered from his indignant face to my tear-filled eyes, then down to the baby.
And then, what she said made me gasp, a choked sound that caught in my throat:
“Kevin. Your… your mother is here. And I heard what you just told her about this baby… about how he’s going to ruin everything for you and her!”
Her? The word echoed in my skull. A cold, nauseous dread began to spread through my belly, stronger even than the fatigue. Kevin’s face went white. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
“Mother, what are you talking about?” I managed to choke out, my voice barely a whisper. My grip on my baby tightened instinctively. This couldn’t be happening.
My mother-in-law sighed, a heavy, resigned sound. She walked closer, her eyes fixed on Kevin. “Don’t play coy, son. You think I don’t know? You think I haven’t seen the messages, the late nights, the sudden trips ‘for work’?”
Kevin finally found his voice. “This is none of your business! And certainly not hers!” He gestured wildly at me, then retreated into the bathroom, slamming the door. The baby stirred, whimpering.
I swayed, suddenly dizzy. He was cheating. The pieces clicked into place with horrifying clarity: his sudden distance, the way he flinched from my touch, the absolute indifference to our new baby, and now, the outright cruelty. He didn’t see our son as a miracle, but as a burden. An obstacle.
“He’s been seeing someone else, hasn’t he?” The words were ice on my tongue, but I needed to hear them confirmed. I needed to know the truth, no matter how much it tore me apart.
My mother-in-law sat down heavily on the bed, looking at me with an expression of profound pity. “Oh, honey. It’s so much worse than that.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. WORSE? How could it be worse than this? He lied to me. He cheated on me. He resents our son.
She took a deep breath, her eyes brimming with tears now too. “He didn’t tell you. I know he didn’t. He promised me he wouldn’t. But you deserve to know now. Everything.”
She reached out, gently stroking our baby’s head. “He wanted a baby so badly. He always said it. But he didn’t want a baby, honey. He wanted this baby. With you.”
I blinked, confused. What was she saying?
“You see,” she continued, her voice low and broken, “His grandfather’s will… it had conditions. He stood to inherit a massive trust fund, enough to set him up for life. But only if he was married with a child by his thirtieth birthday.”
My blood ran cold. My thirtieth birthday had been six months ago. We had gotten married a year before that. And our baby was barely two weeks old.
“He was twenty-nine when you met him,” she whispered, looking away, unable to meet my gaze. “He was with the other woman then, too. For years. But she wasn’t… she wasn’t ‘suitable’ to present to the family. And she wouldn’t have a baby with him for them. He needed someone… stable. Someone he could bring home. Someone who would give him a child, no questions asked.”
The room spun. My ears rang. The tiny weight of my son in my arms suddenly felt like a crushing burden. My baby. OUR BABY WAS NOT A CHILD OF LOVE, BUT A MEANS TO AN INHERITANCE.
“He said he loved me,” I whispered, the words barely audible. “He promised me a family.”
My mother-in-law finally looked back at me, her eyes filled with regret and shame. “He needed you, honey. He needed the child. And he knew you would make a wonderful mother.”
My throat closed up. The man I loved, the father of my child, had used me. Used us. Every tender word, every shared dream, every desperate plea for a baby… It was all a calculated performance. This sweet, innocent life in my arms was nothing more than a living, breathing clause in a will. And now that he had what he wanted, he was free to resent the “complication” of fatherhood, free to pursue his “real life” with someone else, while I worked myself to death to make ends meet, completely unaware that my entire marriage, my entire world, was nothing more than a transaction.
MY GOD. I had been nothing more than a womb for hire.
