I thought I knew every chapter of my sons’ lives because I’d been there for nearly all of them. Then they brought something from our past to my dinner table, and suddenly, the story I knew began to unravel.
The basket sat on my dining table as if it had fallen through time that Friday.
Woven wicker, one broken reed near the handle, the same faded blue lining I hadn’t touched in 20 years. My grown sons watched me from across the table, their dinner plates barely touched. I couldn’t move my hands.
“Mom?” Caleb’s voice sounded far away.
I was in my early 50s, but I felt 32 again, standing barefoot on a porch, staring at two tiny faces I’d never seen before.
The official diagnosis came on a Monday. I remember because Ben and I had tickets to a concert that Friday, and I spent the drive home wondering if we should still go.
We didn’t.
“You can’t give me the family I want,” my husband muttered a few weeks later, a duffel bag already at his feet. Ben wouldn’t look at me. He just kept staring at the light switch by the door as if it could soften the blow.
“So that’s it,” I said.
“Kim, don’t make this harder.”
“Harder for whom? You knew infertility was a possibility; I mean, look at me?!”
He left before I could answer my own question.
Raymond showed up that same night with two pizzas.
I hadn’t called him. I hadn’t called anyone.
But there he was on my porch in his beat-up jacket, looking at me the way he’d looked at me since college, as if I were something worth showing up for.
“What’s wrong, Kimberley? Where’s Ben?” he asked when he saw the tears and my puffy face.
“Raymond, Ben left. I couldn’t give him children because of my dwarfism.”
Then I cried.
