“We mean nothing to you, huh?” my sister sobbed when I refused to host again; “God, you’re cold,” my parents snapped; I smiled, unfazed, “Trust me, I care,” then I pressed play, my family’s expressions cracked like glass as they heard…
My name is Janet Tatum. I am thirty-three years old, and I live in a modest but comfortable two-bedroom house in Cedar Falls, Iowa, about three miles from the neighborhood where I grew up. I work as a senior data analyst for a midsized agricultural supply company called Heartland Grain Solutions.
I have held that position for six years now, and I earn around seventy-four thousand dollars a year. It is not glamorous money, but it is honest. It is stable, and it is mine.
Every single dollar I have ever saved, I earned through long hours, careful budgeting, and the kind of discipline nobody in my family ever bothered to learn. I need to tell you this story from the very beginning. Because if I skip even one detail, you will not understand why I did what I did on the afternoon of November 23, 2024.
You will not understand why I pressed play. And you will not understand why, when the faces of my family cracked like glass, I did not feel guilt. I felt free.
Let me start with my family. My parents are Gerald and Norin Tatum. My father is sixty-one.
He retired early from his job as a warehouse supervisor for a regional hardware distributor. My mother is fifty-eight. She has not worked a paying job since 1999.
She calls herself a homemaker, though by the time I was old enough to notice, the home was not particularly well made. My younger sister is Colette Tatum. She is twenty-nine years old.
Colette has never held a steady job for longer than seven months. She bounces between part-time gigs, online selling schemes, and what she calls creative ventures that never seem to produce any income. She lives in a rented apartment on the east side of Waterloo with her boyfriend, Dwayne Mercer, who works at an auto body shop and somehow always seems to have just enough money to cover rent and nothing else.
Growing up, Colette was the favorite. I know every family has its dynamics, and I know people say parents do not have favorites, but those people either had fair parents or they were the favorite and never had to see it from the other side. In my family, the favoritism was not subtle.
What happened next changed everything… continues on the next page.
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