The light that filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Mahatta was not warm and inviting, but a cold clarity that underscored every crack in my exhaustion.
I looked in the mirror and barely recognized the haggard, puffy, and disfigured woman who stared back at me, a worn-out version of who she had been just a few months ago.
My name is Appa Vape, I am twenty-eight years old, but my body and mind feel decades older after giving birth to triplets exactly six weeks ago.
Leo, Sam, and Noah are beautiful, tiny, fragile; three newborn babies who breathe in fits and starts while I try to sustain their lives with coffee, clean diapers, and a patience that is running out.
My body is uncharted territory: soft where it was once firm, stretched by silvery stretch marks, marked by an emergency cesarean scar that saved three lives and shattered my energy.
The lack of sleep was so brutal that if I turned my head too fast, the room tilted, the walls shook, and the world seemed like a ship about to sink.
She lived in a barely controlled calm, trapped in the impossible logistics of feeding, changing and comforting three babies at once, amid overlapping cries and schedules that never coincided.
The nannies lasted two weeks at most; they left with nervous apologies, muttering that caring for triplets was too much even for a professional, leaving me alone to face the domestic chaos.
Our house, four hundred square meters of impeccable luxury, felt small, saturated with cribs, bottle warmers, piles of diapers and mountains of unfolded baby clothes.
I was there, in pajamas stained with milk, my hair tied up in a crooked bun, holding a crying baby in my arms and two others in the stroller, when he came in.
Mark, my husband, CEO of Apex Dynamics, showed up in a perfectly pressed charcoal-colored Tom Ford suit, smelling of expensive cologne, success, and a contempt that was almost palpable.
He didn’t look at the sleeping triplets, didn’t ask how I was, didn’t offer any help; he looked at me as if he were evaluating an asset that had irretrievably lost value.
Without a kind word, he threw a thick folder onto the quilt; the thud sounded like a judge’s gavel, and the letters PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE shone like a sentence.
He didn’t talk about irreconcilable differences or therapeutic processes; he talked about aesthetics, image, appearance, with such cold cruelty that it took my breath away and left me paralyzed.
Her gaze slowly wandered over my dark circles, the saliva stain on my shoulder, the postpartum girdle visible under my pajamas, the extra weight of having carried three babies.
“Look at you, Appa,” he said with disgust; “you look like a human scarecrow, slovenly, unkempt, repulsive; you’re ruining my image, and a CEO of my caliber needs a wife who represents power and sophistication.”
I blinked, too tired to cry, and whispered that I had given birth to her three children six weeks ago, that my body was just now learning to stand up again.
He shrugged, adjusting his platinum cufflinks, and replied that if I had let myself « go » in the process, it was not his problem, but my personal decision.
Then, as if she had been rehearsing it for weeks, she announced her affair with indifferent superiority: “I am seeing someone else, someone who does understand the demands of my public position.”
Chloe appeared in the doorway as if responding to a signal; her twenty-two-year-old assistant, impeccable in a designer dress, perfect makeup and a small, triumphant smile.
He looked at me the way one looks at someone else’s defeat, observing his wife in pajamas with a diaper in her hand, while she showed off every inch of the future she believed was secure.
“We’ll go to the office together,” Mark said, speaking to me as if I were a domestic servant; “my lawyers will take care of the agreement, you can keep the house and the garden.”
He added that he was fed up with the noise, the hormones and the chaos, with seeing me dragging my feet, dressed in spilled milk, as if I had given up on life forever.
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