The Silence Between Us

Lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t heard my husband coming upstairs. He stood in the doorway, looking worried.

— “Where is our daughter?” he asked sharply.
— “She’s still asleep,” I replied, my tone as curt as his.

The atmosphere was heavy. Everything between us had become tense. Every word, every silence. The arrival of this second child was already wearing us down emotionally. Financially, we were barely staying afloat.

I was the one who had wanted this child. I wanted to give our daughter a companion, someone to hold hands with when the world felt too big. I didn’t want her to grow up in the loneliness I had seen when a kid grows up being an only child—thirsty for love, chasing friendships that always seemed to slip away.

My husband had hesitated. He had reflected. He had calculated. He worried. He didn’t see the future the way I did. Or maybe… he saw it too clearly?
He often told me he could read the future, and that frightened me—because I saw despair in his eyes.

And I… I was a dreamer. I told him things would change, that doors would open, that love was sometimes enough to bring abundance into our lives.
He would say nothing. He’d just look at me with that hard, frustrated, accusing look. I knew that look too well. It had replaced his tender gestures.

I was a mother before anything else. And it seemed I no longer knew how to balance that role with being a wife.
Our daughter, at just four years old, was already witnessing our arguments. Our silences. She watched us, eyes wide open, as if trying to decode a language no one had ever taught her.

And so, I hated myself. And I hated him even more…
I thought of the child growing inside me, this little being, soon to arrive in a home that no longer felt like one.

And yet…

There was a time when our home overflowed with laughter. With promises. With light.

I remember myself, sitting on the sofa covered with a gray slip, his head on my lap, a book in my hands. He’d find something funny on his phone, interrupt me with a laugh to share it. And I would stop to tell him what I loved about the passage I was reading.
He’d wait patiently for my poetic rambling to finish.
Together, we dreamed of a better world for our child.

I remember the night I found out I was pregnant. Our first. I had just stepped out of the bathroom, the test still in my hand.
He looked at me, eyes shining like a child at Christmas.
He had lifted me in his arms, and we had danced, there in the middle of the living room, laughing.

He had made lists of baby names. Strange, original combinations. He always had more imagination, more creativity than I did.
And every Saturday, he’d cook spicy dishes because I had what he called “uncontrollable cravings.”
He’d stir, taste, come to me with a spoon in hand. “Taste this. Tell me what you think,” he’d say with that mischievous smile I loved so much.

That smile… it disappeared somewhere.
Maybe at the bottom of a drawer filled with bills, broken dreams, and lost intimacy.
Maybe in a conversation we never got to finish.

I watch the morning light filter through the curtains. I hear our daughter stirring in her room.
My heart stirs too. My eyes shine.

And I wonder…
Will our love break, one day, for good?

But I take comfort.

I’m still here.
Mother. Woman.
Tired. But alive.