“She’s been doing this for weeks,” she murmured.
And that sentence devastated me.
The truth came out slowly.
Piece by piece.
My mother criticized everything from the moment she arrived.
Sarah was holding Oliver askew.
He was poorly fed.
I bathed him incorrectly.
Bad posture.
Retrieved incorrectly.
If Sarah said she was tired, my mother called her weak.
If she asked to be left alone to pump her milk, my mother would make fun of her.
If Oliver cried in my mother’s arms, it was in one way or another Sarah’s fault too.
“She kept saying I was lucky she was there,” Sarah murmured.
“She said if people knew what I was really like, they’d think I wasn’t cut out to be a mother.”
My mother calmly laid down the blanket.
“Women can be very emotional after giving birth,” she said. “I was helping her to compose herself.”
“By grabbing her hair near my son’s crib?”
“She’s provoking me…”
“No,” I said softly.
“You intimidate her. And when she reacts, you call her unstable.”
That’s when my mother’s mask fell away.
“She turned you against your own mother in less than a year,” she said coldly.
“No,” I replied.
“The images did that.”
Then Sarah whispered something that chilled me to the bone.
“She told me… if Oliver ever got hurt while I left him alone with her… no one would believe it wasn’t my fault.”
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
Everything suddenly made sense.
Each time, Oliver cried even harder in my mother’s presence.
Each time, Sarah refused to leave the room when she held him in her arms.
She stayed awake each time, even when exhausted.
I took my sleeping son in my arms.
I looked at my mother.
And he uttered only one sentence.
“Pack your bags.”
At first, she laughed.
She thought I would give in.
She had spent my whole life teaching me to soften my feelings in the face of her mood swings, to excuse her cruelty and to call her control “love”.
“You’re kicking me out?” she said. “Even though your wife is clearly unstable?”
I looked at Sarah.
She was trembling near the cradle.
But for the first time, she wasn’t shrinking.
She looked at me with a fragile hope.
And that hope hurt more than anything.
Because it meant she wasn’t sure I would choose her.
