Mom Heard Sobs Coming From The Bathroom Every Day At 4 Pm. When She Broke The Lock, She Froze
I became a single mother when Lily was just four months old, in the sort of quiet, devastating way that happens in movies but feels impossibly loud in real life.
It was a Tuesday. I remember because the garbage truck was groaning down the street, the brakes squealing like a dying animal. I walked into the kitchen, shifting Lily from one hip to the other, sleep crusted in my eyes, expecting to see him making coffee. Instead, the coffee pot was cold and dry. The air in the house felt thinner, less occupied.
There was a note on the kitchen counter, anchored by the salt shaker.
It read: “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.”
That was it. Seven words to dismantle a life. The paper was torn from a yellow legal pad, the handwriting hasty and jagged, like he was afraid if he took too long to write it, the ink might bind him to us forever. He had packed his bags while we slept—while his daughter breathed soft, milky breaths in the crib next to our bed—and he had slipped out into the gray dawn.
The truth was, he couldn’t handle the weight of it. He was a man who still thought weekends were for sleeping in and paychecks were for beer. The sleepless nights, the colic, the constant, demanding reality of another human life depending on him—it terrified him. So he ran.
He left me with a colicky infant, a leased apartment, and a mountain of bills that sat on the counter like vultures waiting to feed.
Those early years are a blur of exhaustion in my memory, a gray montage of fatigue. I worked double shifts at The Rusty Spoon, a diner on the edge of town where the neon sign buzzed with an angry electrical hum and the coffee tasted like burnt hazelnuts. I pulled sixteen-hour days, my feet swelling inside cheap, non-slip shoes, serving eggs to truckers who called me “sweetheart” and didn’t tip, just to keep the lights on and formula in the cupboard.
My mother was my lifeline. She was the only reason we didn’t drown. She looked after Lily while I was at work, rocking her to sleep when she cried, feeding her the bottles I had prepped at 4:00 AM. I would come home smelling of grease and sanitizer, my back throbbing, but the moment I walked through the door and saw Lily’s face—her eyes lighting up, her chubby hands reaching for me—the pain would recede.
But let’s be honest: love doesn’t pay the electric bill. There were nights when I cried myself to sleep, muffling my sobs in the pillow so I wouldn’t wake the baby. There were days when I had to choose between paying the gas bill or buying Lily new shoes because her toes were curling in her old ones. We played “camping” when the power got cut off, eating cold beans by candlelight, pretending it was an adventure and not a failure.
