The quiet hum of the fluorescent kitchen light usually soothed me, but tonight it felt like a spotlight, harsh and unforgiving, pinning me to this chair. A worn-out math textbook lay open on the table, its pages bent from countless frustrated fingers. Mine, and theirs.”What’s three times three?” I asked again, my voice softer than I felt inside. Please, just get it this time.A small head, crowned with messy, sleep-tousled hair, bent lower over the page. A tiny pencil tapped nervously against the numbers. “I don’t know,” a whisper, barely audible, laced with familiar shame.
My heart ached. Not just for the struggle with multiplication, but for the struggle with everything this question brought up in me. It wasn’t just math. It was a countdown. A ticking clock. And the answer, for me, was never nine.
We’d always wanted this. A family. A house filled with laughter, tiny shoes by the door, the chaos of childhood. From the moment we met, it was our shared dream, a blueprint for a future we both craved with every fiber of our being. We spent years building our lives, planning for that perfect moment, that perfect addition. Then we started trying. And trying. And trying.
A woman storming off | Source: Pexels
The doctors’ visits became a second job. The hopeful smiles turning to grimaces, then outright tears. Month after month, the same crushing disappointment. Each negative test felt like a punch to the gut. Each failed cycle, another piece of my soul chipped away.
Then came the diagnosis. My partner was infertile. The words hung in the air like a death sentence to our dream. I watched him crumble, watched the light dim in his eyes. The strong, optimistic man I loved, reduced to a shadow of himself, haunted by a future he believed he couldn’t give us. “I can’t give you what you want,” he’d choked out one night, tears streaming down his face, clinging to me as if I might disappear. “You deserve more.”
But I didn’t want more. I just wanted this. I wanted us to have a child. I saw the pain in his eyes every time a friend announced a pregnancy, every time we passed a playground. I knew, with an agonizing certainty, that losing this dream would break him completely. It would break us.
A worried teenage boy | Source: Midjourney
That’s when the desperation set in. A cold, quiet kind of resolve that pushed aside all the normal rules, all the moral boundaries. I started researching, quietly, secretly. Sperm donors. Clinics. Options. So many options, all of them feeling sterile, impersonal.
Then, one evening, I was talking to our friend. His best friend, actually. They’d known each other since grade school, practically brothers. He was kind, intelligent, funny, and always there for us. We were all having dinner, laughing, just like old times, when he casually mentioned having done a sperm donation years ago, just to help out a friend of a friend who was struggling. My mind, already a swirling vortex of plans and anxieties, latched onto it.
Could it be? A seed of an idea, dangerous and thrilling, began to sprout.
I agonized over it for weeks. Days turned into sleepless nights. My partner was sinking deeper into his despair, talking about adopting, about giving up. I couldn’t let him. I couldn’t let us give up. Not yet.
An emotional woman with her eyes downcast | Source: Midjourney
I cornered our friend, heart hammering against my ribs, convinced he’d reject me, judge me. Instead, he listened. He listened with that same kind, steady gaze. When I finished, breathless, spilling out my desperate, unethical plan – to use his sperm, to tell my partner it was an anonymous clinic donor, to pretend this baby was the miracle we’d always prayed for – he didn’t flinch. He just nodded. He said yes. He said he understood how much we wanted this, how much I loved my partner, and he wanted to help. He wanted to help us have our dream.
The process was a blur of hushed conversations, carefully timed appointments, and so many lies. My partner was ecstatic when the test came back positive. He cried, he laughed, he held me so tight I thought my ribs would crack. He believed it was a miracle, a spontaneous recovery, proof that God had finally answered our prayers. I let him believe it. I needed him to believe it.
A disheartened boy | Source: Midjourney
Nine months later, our child arrived. Perfect, tiny, every single finger and toe accounted for. I held that little bundle, my heart overflowing with a love so fierce it almost swallowed the guilt whole. Almost. My partner, doting, proud, completely oblivious. He saw his features in theirs, his spirit. He saw himself. And I saw… what I saw. A beautiful child. And a silent echo of another face, a familiar smile, that was not his.
Nine years. Nine years I’ve carried this secret.
“Three times three,” I prompt again, gently. The pencil hovers.
“Eight?” the small voice tries, hopefully.
I shake my head, a familiar wave of despair washing over me. It’s always wrong. Always just a little bit off.
A devastated boy | Source: Midjourney
My partner walks into the kitchen then, his smile warm and easy. He ruffles their hair, kisses the top of my head. “Rough night with the multiplication table, huh?” he chuckles, oblivious, completely, utterly oblivious. “Don’t worry, champ. You’ll get it. It’s just nine.”
He says “nine” so easily. So confidently.
And I look at my child, struggling with the simplest of math facts, and then I look at him, my loving, trusting partner. And then my mind flashes to our friend, the one who visits on weekends, who is practically family, who laughs and plays with our child as if they were his own niece or nephew.
And the silent answer rings in my head, a deafening crescendo that only I can hear, echoing the truth that I swallowed whole all those years ago.
Because “What’s three times three?” is not nine. Not for me.
Silhouette of a mother with her son | Source: Freepik
It’s one egg. My egg.
It’s one sperm. His best friend’s sperm.
It’s one desperate mother. Me.
Three individuals, creating one beautiful, beloved child.
The answer isn’t nine. It’s the devastating truth that there are three biological parents, not two, and only one of them knows the real multiplication table. And the product of that multiplication is a lifetime of unbearable guilt, and a child who may never truly understand why a simple math problem feels like a secret language only I can speak.
It’s a secret that threatens to shatter everything, every single day.
EVERY SINGLE DAY.
