When It Happens to You by Molly Ringwald

Author:Molly Ringwald
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN IT HAPPENS TO YOU

WHEN IT HAPPENS TO YOU, you will be surprised. That thing they say about how you knew all the time but just weren’t facing it? That might be the case, but nevertheless, there you will be. You will feel like you have been kicked in the stomach, that your insides have just separated to make room for something big.

You may not cry at first. You may wonder why you don’t cry, and you may even feel like there is something seriously wrong with you. You might look at yourself as though you were a character in a book or a movie and you might think to yourself, “Why isn’t that woman crying? What’s wrong with her?”

It isn’t the first time you will think that there is something wrong with you. You will search for the reason why he would choose her over you, why he would choose a girl over a woman. And then you will become certain that it is your age. You are spoiled—like the items in the pantry that were supposed to last indefinitely but somehow the pantry moths found their way inside. You will feel that you were thrown out just like that box of cereal was thrown out to keep everything else around it from becoming ruined.

If you are lucky enough to have children by then, you will struggle to explain to them why their parents no longer love each other the same way. Your children will assume that it is their fault, and though you will do your very best to explain to them why it isn’t, a part of you will secretly fear that it is. You will have already looked at your children at times with a critical eye and seen all of the youth and freshness that you and he once had, all that vitality and hope, and you will know that they took it away. You can’t ever say that they stole it, because you gave it willingly. Still, once it was gone you missed it and envied it while hoping that you both would be strong enough to bear its absence.

He will not.

The girl who will give him back this illusion of vitality for a short time will not think of your children or your marriage. She will not consider the lovely years that you spent together with him. Why would she? She wasn’t there when you both laughed your way through your wedding with a pure and nervous joy. She wasn’t there when you both waited for your first child to be born. When he held your hand and told you how the contractions were coming, with the seriousness of a boy, as he watched the peaks on the machine that was connected to your belly—you listening to the wondrous familiarity of his voice as though all of your lives depended on it, though truthfully your body knew already in the moments before. She wasn’t there when you held him upright at his father’s funeral and then at his mother’s only weeks after.

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