My Future Mil Handed Me A 60-page Prenup At Our Rehearsal Dinner. It Forbade Me From Gaining 20 Lbs Or I’d Lose My Future Kids. I Walked Out, But Should I Have Fought For Him?
Small Victories
I was sitting at my desk 3 and 1/2 months after the wedding got cancelled when my lawyer called. She sounded almost cheerful when she told me Judith had dropped the gift return demand.
Her own lawyer apparently advised her that she had no legal standing and continuing would just cost her money in legal fees she’d never recover. I thanked her and hung up feeling this weird mix of relief and suspicion.
It was a small victory, sure, but I was cynical enough to wonder what Judith’s next move would be. People like her didn’t just give up because a lawyer told them they were wrong, that they pivoted and found new ways to make your life difficult.
I saved the email confirmation from my lawyer and added it to the growing file of documentation about Judith’s behavior. The file was getting pretty thick at this point.
Two weeks later my boss called me into her office and I had that instant stomach drop thinking something was wrong. Instead, she smiled and told me I was promoted to senior analyst.
The raise was significant enough that I could actually start rebuilding my savings after the wedding disaster had drained them. I tried to stay professional but I’m pretty sure I was grinning like an idiot when I left her office.
That evening Roheit took me out for celebratory drinks at this bar downtown that made really good cocktails. We were on our second round when he mentioned casually that the Redmond account had specifically requested I not be assigned to any of their projects.
My stomach dropped again but Rohit just shrugged and said my boss had handled it by assigning me to better accounts. Anyway, he raised his glass and said I was too good for their business anyway.
I clinked my glass against his and felt grateful that my professional life was moving forward even while my personal life was still recovering from the wreckage.
The next morning I opened my work email and found a message from Alex. I stared at the sender name for a solid minute before I could make myself click it; he’d somehow gotten my work address which annoyed me but the content of the email made me forget about that.
He said he was moving out of his family’s company to take a job with a competitor. He wrote that he was doing it partly because of our conversations about independence and how he needed to separate his identity from his mother’s control.
He made it clear he wasn’t asking to get back together. He just wanted me to know I had an impact on his life and he was trying to become the person I needed him to be.
I read the email three times and each time it made me sadder. It was probably too late for us.
Too much damage had been done and too much time had passed. But I was glad he was making changes for himself, even if those changes came too late to save what we had.
