I broke my wrist in a fall. I thought the hardest part would be asking for help. But it wasn’t the cast, or the pain, or even the recovery. It was what my husband said when I finally told him how humiliated I felt. That sentence broke something in me, and I didn’t fix it.You think breaking a bone will teach you how to ask for help. But sometimes, it teaches you who will never offer it.Two months ago, I slipped on the back steps while carrying groceries and shattered my right wrist. It wasn’t a hairline fracture or a sprain. It was full-cast, surgery-scheduled, can’t-button-my-jeans kind of broken.My husband, Wells, made a show of “helping.”By which I mean he sighed through every task like he was clocking in for community service.
When he washed the dishes, he made sure I heard the clatter. When he did laundry, he left my shirts in a pile and claimed that ironing them “hurt his shoulder.”

I thanked him anyway. I felt pathetic enough already.And he loved reminding me I couldn’t drive, couldn’t chop vegetables, and couldn’t even wash my own hair without feeling like I was going to collapse.Then came the Friday that cracked something deeper than my wrist.I had just come back from my follow-up appointment. The orthopedic surgeon rewrapped my wrist in a new cast and told me to keep resting it. I was exhausted from pretending I wasn’t in pain.All I wanted was to sit down and breathe for a minute.Instead, I opened the door and stopped cold.The living room was packed. At least eight men I barely knew, shoes on the rug, pizza boxes stacked like greasy paper towers across the coffee table. There were beer bottles tucked between couch cushions.