When my mother-in-law found out we were moving into a luxury house, she decided to move in with us without asking permission. She sold her house, arrived with everything, and called me in a panic: “Where’s the entrance?” I just smiled, because everything had gone exactly as planned.

It was never a joke with Monica because she simply did not possess a sense of humor regarding her own comfort. At first, we tried to handle her demands with patience by taking deep breaths and politely changing the subject whenever she overstepped.

Silas did what he had always done by softening every boundary so she would not cause a public scene or a family feud. However, she did not view gentleness as a courtesy but rather as a form of pending permission to take whatever she wanted.

If one of us said that we would see about something later, she internally translated that as a definite yes that just needed a little time. In the weeks leading up to our big move, she began talking incessantly about our collective new beginning as a family unit.

She complained about how exhausting it was to maintain her large house in Austin all by herself now that she was getting older. She would press her hand to her chest and repeat that a woman of her age was not meant for so many stairs and so much gardening.

“But oh well, I will just settle in wherever my son needs me to be,” she would add while looking at Silas with a rehearsed expression of a martyr.