I learned that my husband, Q, lied about having a vasectomy the same day I found out I was pregnant. Q had gotten clipped a few months before and we used protection until he returned from the follow-up appointment when he announced his sterility had been confirmed and gave me a high-five.
A couple months later, I was deep cleaning when I found an old pregnancy test in the bathroom cabinet. It felt wasteful to throw it away, so I dusted it off, thinking I’d text Q a picture of the results with, “Grad school here I come!” written below the pink negative line.
After five years of working from home and raising our children during Q’s frequent military deployments, I was thrilled to finally focus on my career.
When a plus sign appeared, a quiet horror bloomed through my body. On its heels was shame for feeling anything but joy in response to the idea of another child — and for immediately thinking, Q lied about the vasectomy, rather than, the test is so old it’s probably expired and the results must be a mistake.
I rolled the test stick between my palms like a cartoon character trying to light a fire. I really am hypercritical, I thought, remembering couple’s therapy, where Q and I worked through his propensity to lie and my increasing distrust and subsequent criticism.
I told myself to put away my emotions until I confirmed the results. I gathered my toddler and preschooler and drove to the only place where I knew I could wander without too much human interaction and also keep my kids safe and entertained: Target. There, I bought and took three new tests, snapped a million pics of toys “to send to Santa,” found out I was definitely knocked up, called my closest friend, and sniffled into a bag of salt and vinegar chips while I pondered if it was possible to start the graduate school program I’d just been accepted into while breastfeeding and working full time with three children under the age of 5.
“He really has been lying all along,” I whispered into the phone. My kids sat in the shopping cart sharing yogurt melts and playing with a Slinky.
***
My doubts started when our first child was an infant. Q would return from deployment and offer to hang with the baby so I could go to the gym for an hour. When I came back to find a desperately hungry kid, full bottles of pumped breastmilk, and Q clicking through Tumblr, he’d claim, “I fed her right after you left.”
Q often finished half gallons of juice and left the empty containers in the fridge. When asked, he’d deny that he had a single sip. Once, he ate generous bites of 27 Jell-O cups I’d set on the top shelf of the fridge for a school birthday party the next morning. “There’s some missing from all of these,” I said, feeling like a dopey bear in Goldilocks, hoping that pointing out the obvious would make the moment less bizarre.
“Huh?” he replied. He claimed our 3-year-old sleepwalked and meticulously scooped out half of each cup. I stared at the cups imagining a reality where my tiny kid would or could do such a thing. I didn’t want to believe it was possible. I also didn’t want to believe I’d married someone so comfortable with rearranging the truth.
Q eventually admitted all of his lies. Neither of us cheated or raged, but sometimes, I couldn’t let it go, like when I asked Q if he’d seen a pair of rain boots I’d just bought but immediately misplaced. He shook his head and helped me search the house. My suspicion grew over the next few days, and I found myself asking Q the same questions over and over until he admitted that he threw the boots away because the look on my face while I cooked dinner one night made him believe I didn’t like him.
When I confronted Q about the often senseless lies, he said I was analyzing him. At first, I was just confused. Eventually, I did more than analyze: I scrutinized. I interrogated. The lies made me feel unsteady in my own life, and I wanted to make them stop.
Across four years and two children, the lies came and went in swarms, like the gnats that occasionally burst up from our kitchen sink and flocked to barely ripe bananas I hung on a little hook in our temporary homes in Virginia Beach, South Florida, Boston and San Diego. Because of the frequent military moves, we had to hop couples therapists in each new town, each one offering Q a different diagnosis and, one way or another, suggesting that I should be patient with him as he worked to be more honest and less “passively reactive.”
To be a good wife, it seemed, I had to put aside my grip on reality. I found myself casually ripping my mind into fragments: The cognitive dissonance between the events I observed and Q’s fabrications caused me to spend hours retracing the moments of our lives. What am I doing that makes him afraid to tell me the truth? I asked myself. Even though Q worked mostly alone in a quiet room whether he was on base or on a ship, I wondered if his military service had caused or contributed to these behaviors. I believed it was my job to stick around and to help him find the right support.
The truth I craved came fast after I found out I was pregnant with our third baby. After Target, dinner and bedtime, Q heated up dinner. I folded laundry and watched him. I planned a quiet conversation, but when he sat down with his plate, I blurted, “Did you fake the vasectomy?”
He closed his eyes and then opened them.
“I didn’t want to deal with the follow-up appointment,” he said.
Part of me wanted to inundate him with questions, but I knew he’d likely shut down. Words reeled like a local news blurb at the bottom of my brain: How the hell did I actually end up here?
I stood up.
“You should’ve told me I could get pregnant.”
I went to bed, too frazzled and overwhelmed to begin a conversation about choice, fetuses, babies, the financial future of our family or whether I could continue to consider Q as part of my family at all.
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