I’m 65, and I’m really tired. I worked 3 jobs while also taking care of my husband after his harsh accident. We’d been together for 32 years. I never complained — I mean, love is worth everything.
One day, I was coming home from another city on the bus, tired AS HELL. It was so stuffy I felt sick. This woman next to me agreed to switch seats so I could move to the window.
I looked out at the window… and froze. Tears immediately filled my eyes. MY HUSBAND HAD LITERALLY BETRAYED ME! He was there with…
…two younger guys outside a gym, laughing.
But that wasn’t the betrayal. The betrayal was that he was standing.
He wasn’t in the wheelchair I had pushed him in for the last ten years. He wasn’t using the walker I helped him with every morning before my first shift. He was standing tall, looking strong, healthy, and completely mobile. He slung a heavy gym bag over his shoulder like it weighed nothing—the same shoulder he claimed hurt too much to even lift a coffee cup some mornings.
The bus pulled away before I could scream. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. For a decade, I had sacrificed my sleep, my health, and my retirement to be his nurse, his provider, and his servant because I thought he was helpless. He had recovered years ago and just… never told me. He let me work myself into an early grave so he could live a life of leisure while I was gone.
When I finally dragged my exhausted body through our front door an hour later, he was sitting in his usual spot in the recliner, the wheelchair parked conspicuously nearby.
“Hey honey,” he said in the weak, strained voice he always used with me. “My back is killing me today. Could you get me an ice pack before you start dinner?”
I didn’t say a word. I walked past him into our bedroom and pulled out my old suitcase.
“What are you doing?” he called out, panic creeping into his voice.
I walked back into the living room, suitcase in hand. I looked him dead in the eye. “I saw you on 5th Street. Outside the gym.”
His face went pale. He forgot himself and stood straight up, perfectly fine, without even reaching for his cane. The silence in the room was deafening.
“I’m done,” I said, my voice shaking not with sadness, but with finality. “You can get your own ice pack. You can get your own dinner. And you can get your own life. Because I’m taking mine back.”
I walked out the door into the cool evening air. I was 65, broke, and tired, but for the first time in a decade, I could finally breathe.
