“Maybe Amanda can help. She’s the creative one, right? The special one.”
“Amanda doesn’t have any money.”
“Neither do I, Mom. Not anymore. I have three children, a deployed husband, and a four-thousand-two-hundred-ninety-dollar nanny bill because you wouldn’t help me for four hours. I have a NICU bill that’s currently at one hundred twenty-seven thousand dollars. I have a mortgage of my own because I finally bought a house. Something I could have done years ago if I hadn’t been funding your lifestyle.”
“This is our home, Rebecca.”
“And it would have been gone nine years ago if I hadn’t saved it. You’ve had nine extra years there because of me. That’s nine years more than you would have had.”
My mother’s face twisted.
“You’ve always been selfish. Rigid. This is exactly why we’ve never been close.”
Something inside me cracked open.
“We’ve never been close because you never wanted to be close to me. I’m not artistic like Amanda. I’m not fun or spontaneous. I’m just reliable, boring Rebecca who pays the bills and doesn’t complain. Well, I’m done. I’m done paying for a relationship that has always been one-sided.”
“If you don’t help us, we’ll be homeless.”
“Then I guess you’ll figure it out. You’re adults.”
I closed the door.
My mother pounded on it for fifteen minutes while Olivia and Noah stared at me with confused faces.
“Why is Grandma yelling?” Olivia asked.
“Because she wants something I can’t give her anymore,” I said.
“Is it love?” Noah asked, in that eerily perceptive way three-year-olds sometimes have.
I swallowed hard.
“Yeah, buddy. Something like that.”
The calls continued.
My mother called eighty-two times in a single day.
When I blocked her on everything, she started showing up at my house. I stopped answering the door.
She left notes.
“You’re destroying this family.”
“Your father is having chest pains from the stress.”
“How can you live with yourself?”
Then came the social media campaign.
My mother posted a long, detailed Facebook post about her ungrateful, selfish daughter who had abandoned her elderly parents in their time of need.
She painted herself as the loving mother who had sacrificed everything and was now being punished by a heartless child.
She left out the Hamilton tickets.
She definitely left out the four hundred eighty-six thousand dollars.
Extended family I barely knew started commenting.
“Elders deserve respect.”
“Family takes care of family.”
“What happened to family values?”
I didn’t respond.
I was too busy with NICU visits, taking care of the twins, and trying to keep myself together while my husband was overseas.
But then, four weeks after Ethan’s birth, something happened that changed everything.
I was at the hospital, sitting next to Ethan’s isolette in the NICU, when a nurse came in and said I had a visitor.
“He says he’s your grandfather. Should I send him in?”