and the only reason he could call it nothing
was that he’d never had to pay for it.
How dare you, he yelled.
I dare because moms get sick days now, I said.
I just hired the staff to cover them.
He could pay it,
or he could do the thing I’d asked for all along—
help raise his own sons.
He chose, in the end, to help.
He learned the diapers and the 3 a.m. feedings
and the exhausting, relentless, invisible weight of it,
and he never called it nothing again.
I didn’t punish my husband.
I invoiced him.
And the bill for everything I’d done for free
turned out to be the only thing
that finally made him see
it was never nothing at all.
THE END
