I set the green bean casserole down on the kitchen counter, still warm from my oven three blocks away, and untied my apron. My hands were shaking, but not from the cold November air I’d just walked through. They were shaking because I’d finally heard it—the thing I’d been pretending not to notice for the last two years.
“Why don’t you eat in the kitchen, Mom?” my son, David, said. “Jessica and I need the dining room for our actual guests.”
He said it so casually, like he was asking me to pass the salt, like I wasn’t his mother, like I hadn’t spent the last six weeks preparing for this Thanksgiving dinner in his new house—the house I’d helped with the down payment, though we didn’t talk about that anymore.
I picked up my purse from the hook by their front door. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t make a scene. I just walked out, leaving behind the casserole I’d made with my mother’s recipe, the pumpkin pies cooling on their granite countertop, and twenty-three years of convincing myself that my son’s coldness was just his way of being independent.
The walk home was longer than three blocks. It felt like miles.
I’m Margaret, though most people call me Maggie. I’m sixty-seven years old, and until that Thanksgiving evening, I thought I knew exactly who I was: a retired librarian, a widow of four years, a mother of two—David, thirty-nine, and my daughter, Clare, thirty-six—a grandmother of three, and a woman who’d spent her whole life taking care of everyone else, believing that’s what love looked like.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
It started small, the way these things always do—little comments that felt like paper cuts. Jessica, my daughter-in-law, started calling me Margaret instead of Mom about six months after their wedding. When I asked David about it, he shrugged and said, “She has her own mother, you know.” Fair enough, I told myself. Not everyone wants to call their mother-in-law Mom, so I didn’t push it.
Then came the requests. Could I watch the kids on Saturday? Could I pick up groceries? Could I help with the house cleaning before their dinner party? Each time I said yes because that’s what grandmothers do, isn’t it? We help. We show up. We make life easier for our children.
I didn’t notice when “Can you help?” turned into “You should come over and watch the kids.” I didn’t notice when they stopped asking and started expecting. I didn’t notice when I became less like family and more like staff.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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