Member-only story
10,706 km Away
Hardships of being with a humanitarian worker
When Audrey, my wife, left the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to meet me in Colombia after being apart for six months, I never expected we’d have an argument almost immediately. Sitting on bar stools at a simply decorated Japanese restaurant, I remember her asking me about starting a family.
I wasn’t ready to have that discussion.
After 14 years together I still wasn’t ready to have a child. Yet four years prior, when all our friends seemed to have babies, she had already started pressuring me to have a baby.
It was a hard time in our relationship. We had been together for ten years and I still wasn’t ready for it. I felt like I was preventing her from having what she desired most.
At the time, I had two options: have a baby with her even if I wasn’t ready or let her go because I couldn’t give her what she wanted. I hated both options. Outsides of that, we were a perfect couple.
After much thinking, I decided to try for a third option: agree to have a baby with her, but only when I’ll be ready. She agreed, and we had not had the discussion until, five years later, we met up after her mission in the DRC.
To put you in context, while she was away on Doctors Without Borders missions, I was…
