“Tell me the truth.”
She started crying before she even answered.
Not loudly.
Sarah never cried loudly anymore.
The quiet kind of crying.
The kind that almost apologizes while it’s happening.
“She’s been doing it for weeks,” she whispered.
And that sentence hollowed me out.
The truth came out slowly.
Piece by piece.
My mother criticized everything from the day she arrived.
Sarah held Oliver wrong.
Fed him wrong.
Bathed him wrong.
Rested wrong.
Recovered wrong.
If Sarah said she was tired, my mother called her weak.
If she asked for privacy while pumping milk, my mother mocked her.
If Oliver cried in my mother’s arms, somehow that was Sarah’s fault too.
“She kept saying I was lucky she was here,” Sarah whispered.
“She said if people knew what I was really like they’d think I wasn’t fit to be a mother.”
My mother calmly set the blanket down.
“Postpartum women can be emotional,” she said. “I was helping her toughen up.”
“By grabbing her hair next to my son’s crib?”
“She provokes me—”
“No,” I said quietly.
“You intimidate her. And when she reacts, you call her unstable.”
That’s when my mother’s mask dropped.
“She’s turned you against your own mother in less than a year,” she said coldly.
“No,” I replied.