My daughter emailed me: “Don’t come to my wedding. Watch through livestream.”
Okay. I knew what to do.
The deepest wounds are the ones inflicted by those we’ve sacrificed everything for. I should know. I’ve spent fifty-eight years of my life giving pieces of myself away, only to watch them get trampled like they were nothing.
Before I tell you how I finally took back what was mine, you need to understand that I tried. God knows I tried to be the mother they needed. I opened my heart, my home, my wallet, everything.
And what did I get in return? An email. A cold little email telling me I wasn’t welcome at my own daughter’s wedding.
The same wedding I had already put thirty thousand dollars toward. If you stay with me until the end, you’ll understand why sometimes the only way to heal is to make sure the people who hurt you finally feel a fraction of what you felt. The morning I received Natalie’s email, I was sitting at my kitchen island in our quiet New Jersey suburb with a cup of coffee, scrolling through my iPad.
It was a Tuesday in April, unseasonably warm for New Jersey. Through the window over the sink, I could see my neighbor Ted watering his precious hydrangeas in the front yard, the ones he babied more than most people do their children. An American flag on his porch stirred lazily in the light breeze.
My phone pinged with a notification, and there it was—my daughter’s name in bold. I remember smiling before I opened it. Things had been tense between us lately: arguments about wedding plans, about her fiancé Marcel, who I never trusted, about the money.
But wedding planning is stressful for everyone. I told myself we’d work through it. “Mom,” the email began.
No “Dear Mom.” No “Hi, Mom.” Just “Mom,” like a label on a file. “We’ve finalized the guest list for the Paris ceremony. And after discussing it with Marcel and his family, we think it’s best if you join us via livestream instead of in person.
Marcel’s mother has strong opinions about the intimate nature of the ceremony, and we want to respect her wishes.”
I read it twice, my coffee growing cold beside me. The next paragraph was about technical details, how they’d set up a private link, how I could watch “from the comfort of my home,” as if watching my only daughter get married through a screen was some kind of luxury. The kicker came at the end.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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