Number three: they touched you when you did not feel safe. You may not have screamed; you may not have pushed them off. You may have laid there in silence, still and unmoving, but inside, everything in you was shutting down. Your body wasn’t saying yes; it was surviving. At that time, you were tired—not just the kind of tired that sleep fixes, but the kind of tired that comes from giving too much for too long. Your soul was worn thin. You felt disconnected, overwhelmed, maybe even numb. And yet, they still expected excess. They expected you to smile, to give in, to meet their needs before you even had a chance to feel your own. They pressured, they guilted, they pouted, they got angry, and somewhere along the way, you stopped feeling like a person and started feeling like a duty. You convinced yourself, because of their gaslighting, that it wasn’t that bad, that it would be easier to just go along with it—that maybe this was their form of love. It was never that.
Number four: they made you feel like a bad parent for being exhausted. You were doing everything—from feeding to cleaning, comforting and waking up in the middle of the night with a dry throat and aching back—just to make sure your baby was breathing peacefully. You were stretched thin, operating on fumes with no room to fall apart. And yet, instead of receiving care, you were met with criticism. They didn’t see your exhaustion as a cry for support; they saw it as a weakness to exploit. They called you lazy when you could barely keep your eyes open. They compared you to other parents as if parenthood was some kind of competition instead of a calling. They rolled their eyes when you asked for help, made jokes about how little you had done, mocked the very efforts you were making to hold everything together. They didn’t lift the weight; they piled more on top.
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