“He’s cheating again,” I whispered into the phone, fighting through the brain fog that my newly prescribed depression meds gave me. “He’s trying to leave me for another girl after I lost our baby.”
It had only been four and half months since I’d lost my son, and as I sat staring at pictures of my man smiling and kissing another woman, the reason why he’d become so mean and distant, I began trembling. In a calm voice, my best friend Keisha said “I’m so sorry, Nikki. I know this hurts. You don’t need him. I’m here for you. Come home.”
“But he’s my son’s father. He’s all I have left,” I told her, unable to imagine leaving my man’s home in Cali and returning to my apartment full of maternity clothes in Chicago. “He is not all you have left,” Keisha said. “You have me.”
I didn’t know in that moment how much Keisha loved me. So it hurt her pretty bad when she got a call from my man the next day telling her he’d found me unconscious after I tried to kill myself.
It would be another three weeks before I was finally diagnosed with postpartum depression.
Before I fell in love and got pregnant, Keisha and I used to travel. We went to comic book conventions; we went to the Grammys; she even came and sat in on some of my studio sessions in New York when I first started writing for labels. I supported her career and she supported mine. We had a fun life together. Then everything changed.
When my mental health first began to slip, I was secretive. Very few people knew that I was in a toxic relationship with a man who had serious issues of his own, issues for which he refuses, to this very day, to get help to resolve. I’d put my music career on hold to have this family. I had spent my savings trying to have this family.