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 of 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 five. 

“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 analysing him. At first, I was just confused. Eventually, I did more than analyse: I scrutinised. 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 behaviours. 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, foetuses, babies, the financial future of our family or whether I could continue to consider Q as part of my family at all. 

***

In heterosexual marriages like mine where the core issues align with common gender inequalities, women are typically the ones who suffer the most.

Research shows that being married to men adds seven hours of work per week for women. A recent study found that men’s general lack of investment in household labour is linked to women’s decline in happiness and feelings of love in their marriage.

In Lyz Lenz’s 2024 memoir, This American Ex-Wife, she writes: “These days, nearly 70% of divorces are initiated by women who are tired, fed up, exhausted, no longer in love. Women who are unhappy” — a statistic that appears to be holding steady.

I ended up being one of those women, but I didn’t want to believe Q was a monster. I didn’t want to take responsibility for choosing this partner. I wanted to believe my frustration came from our mismatched histories: Q grew up in an upper-class home with far more than his basic needs met; I grew up in a generationally poor family, raising my brother and caring for my mother, who was dealing with mental health issues after my dad died when I was a teen. 

I wanted to believe Q when he said that his weird behaviours came from unhappiness with the military, but when he transitioned to civilian life, nothing changed. I told myself that maybe he, like my mum, just needed better support. I believed that he meant well. His therapists confirmed this. I focused on helping him find doctors and trial medications but hit wall after wall.

***

One day, I vented to my closest friend and told her I was considering divorce. She advised me to eschew the 50/50 marriage rule. “Each of you should give 100%,” she said. “Can you honestly say you are?”

Her question was all the permission I needed to take more responsibility for Q’s behaviour. I didn’t know it at the time, but the way I cared for my brother and mum when I was a kid had primed me to feel safe in a relationship where I constantly monitored and adjusted to my partner’s mood. Fawning — or shifting into fix-it mode — made me feel secure. I believed that if I could convince myself the problems in my marriage were my fault, I could take action and have some control.

Back then, I didn’t know anything about trauma responses. I saw myself as independent and adaptable, able to stay chill in a crisis and work hard — and independently — to meet my own needs and run a home. I’m southern, brusque, loud and often happily fly down into a rabbit hole that nobody else is interested in but me. Nobody in the world would describe me as “clingy.” The word “codependent” didn’t resonate with my personality at all. 

I didn’t understand that my propensity to modify and overwork depending on other people’s moods and needs was a way of self-abandoning. I thought caring and helping gave me dignity. I thought it was the right thing to do, but I was actually disappearing myself from my own life. 

I personally never interrogated the idea that a woman could or even should have it all. I never considered how hard it would be to try to manage it all alone. I maintained the cognitive labour of my new family, much as I had when I was a teenager. My second child was born with a disability, so overnight, I became the “chief medical operator” of our family, too. When I made the decisions to have my first and second children, I didn’t realise how both the distribution of basic tasks and the general management of our daily lives would burn down my patience and turn me into an overworked stress ball.

That’s why I sought therapists when Q’s behaviour became too confusing, but when one couples therapist told me I enabled his dishonesty by always filling in the gaps, I tried to argue, “Why is the onus on me to change things?”

It didn’t get me very far. “I just want you to do one or two things with the house, appointments for the kids, anything,” I pleaded. “Just pick the things, commit to them, and we never have to talk about it again.” 

The therapist asked how my request made Q feel. “Pressured,” he said. He put his head in his hands. 

The therapist suggested that Q take on one task. He picked maintaining the interior of our older minivan. The therapist told me I was not allowed to ask him to do anything else. I agreed, believing I was the problem. 

Within six months, the minivan’s upholstery rotted in the seat crevices thanks to spilled chocolate milk, juice and other substances Q never cleaned up. I sprayed it with hand-me-down perfume and drove with the windows open because it smelled like an actual trash can. But I followed our therapist’s rules and said nothing to Q.

Our relationship didn’t improve, but we surfed an approximation of harmony through avoidance. A part of me knew that the marriage needed to end. Another part of me was terrified to raise my kids and go to graduate school alone without even the spectre of another adult. I followed the couples therapist’s advice: I ignored the problem. I worked with my own therapist on boundaries and assessing my own needs. I raised my kids, prepared for graduate school, and worked.

Then Q suggested a vasectomy. He’d been having problems at work, and I’d just applied for a selective medical graduate program. Both of our young children would soon require at least some day care very soon. Calling it quits on procreation seemed like the best choice for our hearts, our children and our wallets. 

***

When people ask me why I chose to go through with the pregnancy of what would become my third child, I tell them immediately that I’m pro-abortion. I’ve supported friends through the procedure, and I can imagine a dozen situations in which I’d make an appointment and do the same thing for my own body now. 

The truth is, in my specific case in the summer of 2014, whatever we might call my “choice” came from fear.

The morning after I told Q I was pregnant, we sat at the kitchen table, both of our eyes puffy, while our kids watched cartoons. I told him that I absolutely couldn’t imagine having another baby with college classes and work and our daughter’s medical appointments. “It’s not fair to them,” I said, nodding toward our kids as they chattered and cackled at the funny British dog on the screen. “And — we can’t afford it.”

Q nodded.

I told him I wanted to throw up either because of hormones or because an abortion reminded me so much of the night my very first pregnancy, years before I met Q, ended in a stillborn baby. The day that baby was stillborn, I was a feral thing, rocked by endorphins and instinct, gritting my teeth and howling and nearly bleeding to death. The births of my two living children had been a kind of existential balm following the terror of that awful experience. 

I was afraid to be pregnant again. I was also afraid to make myself not pregnant again. 

I told Q that I was so angry that he’d trapped my body inside of this decision. “I didn’t mean to,” he said with a ferocity I rarely heard in his voice. This time, I believed he was telling the truth. I believed he baby-trapped me with avoidance. That’s how disconnected he was from the physicality of consequence. I looked him over, realising that by the time we met, I’d watched my father die and lost a child. It was obvious for the first time that we lived in very different worlds: his was a world of floating, of trying, of struggling to feel good enough or to meet what he believed were the unfair expectations of other people. 

My world was a bit more crucial. Our couples therapist was right: I was fuelled by anxiety and maybe a little too worried that loss would eventually slap me into heartbreak, as it had before. By the time I turned 18, my dad, my cousin, my grandmother and my uncle had all passed away. I lost five childhood homes. Then, a hurricane smashed through my hometown and left it unrecognisable. In the years since I escaped the hammer of Florida, I worked furiously to control loss. But there I sat, staring at the husband I knew I had to leave, a few months past finally weaning my second child, a foetus the size of a grain of rice gathering potential inside my body. 

I had lost the illusion of partnership. I was about to lose my marriage and throw myself into the risk of a career change, graduate school and single parenting. Loss was everywhere. 

I heard myself say it out loud before my brain caught up to the inevitable reality of the only choice I could possibly make given the cascade of death that had been haunting me since high school: if survival meant controlling loss, then I’d have to try to help this grain become a person. 

I didn’t have a lot of power in my life, not really, but I could at least try to do that.

And I did.

But I didn’t quit my job or graduate school. Q disappeared as soon as our marriage ended. I actually did it all for two intense years: waking up at 5am to get everyone ready for day care, dropping them off before class, going to class, going to work, picking up the kids, playing with them, bathing and feeding them, getting them ready for bed and studying at night. I joked with my therapist at our biweekly appointments about the irony of becoming aware of my fawn response during the very years when my kids needed the most care from me, when it was critical for me to continue to both work and go to school so I could financially support my little family. The fact that we all survived makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world.

***

It’s been 10 years since the morning Q and I sat at our kitchen table, trying to figure out what choice meant, trying to understand how to make it. Our divorce papers were signed shortly after the birth of our third child. I finished graduate school, moved to a different city, and Q reappeared in our lives intermittently. 

Of course, I am completely in love with my incredible children.

I’m also aware that the legality of the choice I sat down to make a decade ago was a precious and temporary gift. I’m stunned that we’re back to fighting to maintain such basic autonomy over our bodies — the right to even begin the conversation — especially because the legal choice itself isn’t enough. 

One thing I learned from my fancy medical graduate program is that the more work your brain is doing, the less chance you have to make robust and meaningful decisions. It’s not an exaggeration to say that many women, particularly those in lower income households, are in a state of constant duress from the daily cognitive load of managing their families.

Stress has a negative impact on decision-making for everyone. In many ways, it’s the perfect trap: We have too much stress, too many tasks, and we experience too much judgment if we make the “wrong” choices — as women, wives or mothers. It’s not surprising that women abandon themselves in a country where our basic rights to medical decisions about our own bodies are threatened. Sometimes, fawning — or making the choice that will please the most people regardless of what you actually want or need — feels like the only way to keep yourself safe.

For years, I told myself that if Q had just stopped lying, I could’ve handled anything, but even that perspective is still wrong thinking. The lying caused the splashiest drama between us. The real harm happened in the quieter moments when I routinely eschewed sleep and my own health for the sake of other people’s needs.

I grew up believing that my value was tied to my capacity to do love well. I grew up believing I had to prove my worth as a person — a woman, a mother — by keeping my kids and my partner satisfied. In retrospect, I’m actually kind of grateful for the vasectomy debacle. It was so wild and unavoidable, it woke me up to the weight of stress and hurt I’d been carrying unnecessarily since I was a teenager.

Now that I’m awake to it, I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to learn how to love family without making myself disappear.

Note: Some names and details were changed to protect the privacy of individuals mentioned in this essay.

Asha Dore is a writer and illustrator working on a book about fawning. Bylines include The New York Times, The Cut and Slate. She hosts “Totally Biased Reviews,” a literary interview podcast. Her work can be found at www.AshaDore.net or on Instagram @adjsbb.

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