I’m Mitsuki, and I live with my husband, Shigeru, our seventh-grade daughter, Yuna, and our fourth-grade son, Itsuki. Shigeru and I have been married for 15 years. While he focused on work, I took care of the house and the kids, and we lived a peaceful life together, each doing our part. But one day, Shigeru told me, “From now on, I only want us to get along as parents to our children.” The reason? I had gained about 30 kilograms after having our kids. I believed my weight gain was the result of years of handling the housework and childcare mostly on my own, along with all the stress that came with it. I was disappointed that after 15 years of marriage, Shigeru was still criticizing my appearance without even realizing what I had been through. But then Mariko, a senior coworker at my part-time job, made me realize something: maybe the real problem wasn’t that I had gained weight, but that I had been brushing aside Shigeru’s feelings all along. That realization changed everything. This time, I decided to take losing weight seriously. And then, a year passed…
I think I had been taking him for granted. After all, he was still willing to stay married to me, even if we were only husband and wife in name. I thought that if I sincerely apologized for the things I had said and done in the past and succeeded in losing weight, he would surely forgive me. If I could just lose the weight, everything would go back to the way it was. Deep down, that was what I believed. I suppose that shows just how lightly I had taken the whole situation. But my husband didn’t feel the same way. After a long silence, the only words that finally came out of his mouth were, “I’m sorry.”