“You don’t understand. Those tickets were eight hundred and fifty dollars each. We’d been planning this for months.”
“And I’d been planning to not leave my children without a mother. But I guess your entertainment was more important than your daughter’s life.”
“Rebecca, you’re being unfair.”
“No, Mom. I’m being done. I hired a stranger to care for Olivia and Noah. She was there for them when their mother almost didn’t make it. She held them and comforted them and made sure they were safe. You were at a Broadway show.”
I took a breath.
“Every automatic payment is canceled. You’re on your own.”
“We’ll lose everything. The house. The cars. The club membership.”
“Figure it out yourself, Mom. You’re an adult.”
I hung up.
The calls escalated.
Sixty-seven times the next day.
Seventy-three times the day after that.
I blocked their numbers.
Then came the emails, the Facebook messages, and the texts from relatives I hadn’t heard from in years, all saying the same thing.
How could I abandon my parents?
How could I be so cruel?
How could I let them lose their home?
Not one person asked how my baby was doing.
Not one asked if I was okay.
Not one acknowledged that my mother had chosen a Broadway show over a medical emergency.
I was in the hospital for eight days.
Baby Ethan was in the NICU for five weeks.
Marcus was there for two weeks before he had to return to his deployment.
During all of that, my parents called and called and called, but never once did they ask about their grandson.
It was always about money.
Three weeks after the surgery, my mother showed up at my house.
I was home with the twins while Ethan was still in the NICU. I looked through the peephole and saw her standing there, my father behind her looking defeated.
I opened the door but didn’t invite them in.
“What?”
“We need to talk,” my mother said, trying to push past me.
I blocked the doorway.
“Talk here.”
“Rebecca, please don’t be childish. We drove all the way here.”
“You drove twenty minutes. The same twenty minutes you couldn’t spare when I was in danger.”
“Stop saying you were in danger. You’re fine.”
“I had a seizure on the operating table, Mom. My blood pressure was 220 over 140. The doctor said I was minutes away from a major emergency. Your grandson was born two months premature and is in the NICU with breathing tubes. But sure, I’m fine.”
My father finally spoke.
“Sweetheart, please. We’re going to lose the house. We need you to start the payments again. Just until we figure something else out.”
“Figure out what, Dad? You’re both retired. You have no other income. You’ve been living beyond your means on my money for nine years. If I start paying again, it’ll never end.”
“But we have nowhere else to go,” my mother cried.