One day, she called while I was out with our son.
Her voice cracked on the phone.
“Can you come home?” she asked.
“I need to talk to you.”
When I stepped in, she was seated on the couch, looking tired yet somehow different. There was a softness in her face that I hadn’t seen in a long time.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice trembling.
“I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten. I was so lost in my own world, in my head, that I didn’t see what it was doing to you or to our son.”
I sat down next her, unsure what to say.
She continued talking.
“The therapist is helping.
I know it’ll take time, but I want to be better. Not just for me, but for us. For him.”
Her eyes welled up with tears as she talked, and for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, I recognized the person I had fallen in love with.
Things gradually improved over the next few months.
She began painting again, hesitantly at first.
Her mother would come over and keep our son while she spent a few hours in her art studio, reconnecting with a part of herself she had neglected for far too long.
“I forgot how much I love this,” she told me one evening, showing me a canvas she had been working on. “It feels good to create again.”
Her bond with our son has also begun to repair.
I’d see them reading together or her teaching him how to draw basic shapes with crayons. The distance that had previously separated them was gradually closing.
He seemed happier, more calm, as if he sensed Mommy’s return.
Our family was not perfect, but it was healing.
Together.
