The days were long. God, they were long. Mark would leave for work in the morning and it would be just me, and Judy, and Riley, in a house that had suddenly become far too small, for nine or ten hours at a stretch. Nine or ten hours of that voice, that steady drip drip drip of correction, until I felt like I was slowly losing my mind.
I remember one afternoon in particular. Riley had been fussy all day, the way babies sometimes are for no discernible reason, and I’d finally, after an hour of walking and bouncing and singing, gotten her to settle into a light doze against my chest. I was exhausted, running on maybe three hours of broken sleep, and I sat down very carefully so as not to wake her, and for one blessed moment there was peace.
And Judy looked over from her armchair and said, “You’re holding her too much, you know. You’ll spoil her. In my day we let them cry it out. Put them down and let them learn. You carry that child around like she’s made of glass and you’ll have a clingy, needy little thing on your hands, mark my words. Mark never cried. I made sure of it.”
I did not respond. I had learned, by then, that responding only extended the lecture. I just sat there with my sleeping daughter and stared at the wall and counted, silently, the hours until Mark came home.
I called Mark on his lunch breaks and tried to explain what it was like, and he’d say something soothing and useless like she means well or just try to ignore it or it’s only temporary, and I would hang up feeling more alone than before. Because he wasn’t there for it. He didn’t hear the tone, didn’t feel the way every hour of it wore a little groove into you, didn’t understand that it wasn’t any single comment but the relentless accumulation of them, hundreds of tiny cuts, that was breaking me down.
I told myself I could survive it. It was temporary, right? A few weeks, a couple of months at the outside, while her house got fixed. I could grit my teeth and get through it.
And then, one evening, Judy said the thing that changed everything.
It was after dinner. I had just finished feeding Riley, and I had her up against my shoulder, patting her small warm back, waiting for the burp. Judy sat across the room in the good armchair, the one she’d claimed as hers within a day of arriving, with a cup of tea balanced on her knee. She’d been watching me for a while. I could feel it, that appraising, disapproving stare, but I’d learned to tune it out.
Then she set down her teacup, and she said it. Casually. Lightly. In the exact same tone she might have used to comment on the weather.
“You know,” she said, “maybe you should just let me take Riley. Let me raise her. She’d be so much better off with me, dear. Truly.”
I froze. My whole body went rigid. My hands tightened, instinctively, protectively, around my daughter’s tiny body.
“…I’m sorry,” I said, and I could hear my own voice come out sharper and colder than I’d intended. “Are you joking?”
Judy didn’t even blink. She looked at me with an expression of perfect, placid reasonableness, as though I were the one being unreasonable for not immediately agreeing.
“No,” she said. “I’m not joking at all. I raised Mark, and you married him, so you must think I did a decent job of it. And frankly, dear, I look at you, and I genuinely cannot imagine what kind of child you’re going to raise. It worries me. It keeps me up at night. So I’m offering. Let me take her. Let me do it right.”
I felt a wave of heat rise up through my entire body, from my chest to the roots of my hair. My ears were ringing.
“So let me make sure I understand you,” I said, very quietly, because Riley was still in my arms and I would not, would not raise my voice with her against my shoulder. “You want to take my daughter. From me. And raise her yourself. Because you don’t think I’m good enough.”
“Well,” Judy said, with a little sigh, as though the answer were obvious and I was being slow, “yes, dear. But it would be for the best. For everyone. Especially for her.” And she reached across the space between us and placed a hand on my shoulder, warm and heavy and utterly presumptuous, like she was comforting me, like this was a kindness.
I shoved her hand off my shoulder. My whole body was shaking now, a fine tremor of rage running through me. Without a word, because I did not trust myself to speak, I stood up and turned and marched straight into the nursery.
I laid Riley down in her crib for a moment, and with hands that would barely obey me, I started grabbing her things. Diapers, wipes, bottles, formula, onesies, the swaddles Judy hated. I stuffed all of it into the diaper bag and then into a second larger bag. Then I scooped Riley back up, held her against me, and walked into our bedroom.
Mark was sitting up in bed, reading, comfortable and oblivious. He didn’t register the storm that had walked into the room until I set Riley in the bassinet and yanked open my dresser drawer and started throwing my own clothes into a suitcase.
“Whoa. Hey. Where are you going?” he asked, sitting up straight, alarmed.
“To my mother’s,” I said, not looking at him, still packing. “I’m going to stay at my mom’s until Judy is gone. Out of this house.”
“What? Kate, what happened?” He swung his legs off the bed. “What’s going on?”
I spun around to face him, and I finally let some of it out, though I kept my voice down for the baby. “Do you know what your mother just said to me? Just now? In our living room? She said we should give Riley to her. To raise. Because she doesn’t trust the kind of mother I’ll be. She offered, Mark, like it was a favor, to take our daughter away from us.”
Mark’s face flickered with uncertainty. “I’m… I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that. You know how she talks, she—”
“Oh, she meant it,” I cut in. “Trust me. I was there. I saw her face. She meant every single word.”
Mark opened his mouth, and then closed it. He didn’t argue. That was the thing that told me he believed me, underneath his instinct to smooth it over. He knew his mother. He just sighed, a long, defeated sigh, and reached over to the nightstand and picked up his car keys.
He drove Riley and me to my mother’s house in complete silence. And I let the silence sit, because I had nothing left to say to him that wouldn’t come out as something I’d regret.
That was supposed to be a short term thing. A few days, maybe a week, to let things cool down, to force the issue, to make Mark finally deal with his mother.
It turned into almost three weeks.
Three weeks I lived at my mom’s house, in my childhood bedroom, with Riley in a borrowed bassinet beside me. And in some ways it was a relief. My mother was kind and helpful and, crucially, did not once tell me I was doing anything wrong. She held Riley so I could nap. She cooked. She let me cry when I needed to. It was the first real rest I’d had in months.
My mother, I should say, is everything Judy is not. Warm where Judy is sharp. She’d raised me and my two siblings mostly on her own after my father left, and she’d done it with a kind of easy grace that I only fully appreciated once I became a mother myself. When I’d arrived on her doorstep at eleven at night with a diaper bag and a baby and a face swollen from crying, she hadn’t asked a single question. She’d just opened the door wider and said, “Come in, sweetheart, I’ll put the kettle on,” and taken Riley from my arms so I could set down the bags. That was the difference between the two grandmothers, laid bare. One of them helped. The other corrected.
Those three weeks, I got to watch what it looked like to have a mother figure in the house who made things easier instead of harder. Riley thrived. She slept better, ate better. And I began, slowly, to feel like myself again, to remember that I was actually a competent and loving parent and not the fumbling incompetent Judy had spent a month convincing me I was.
But it was also a marriage slowly bending under a weight that wouldn’t lift.
Mark came to visit nearly every day. He’d show up after work, hold Riley, sit with me, and every time, the tension between us would be a little thicker than the day before. Because every time, I’d ask the same question, and every time, he’d give the same impossible answer.
One evening, about three weeks in, we were sitting in my mother’s living room after Riley had gone down for the night. The exhaustion between us hung in the air like humidity, heavy and hard to breathe through.
“Come home,” Mark said quietly. “Please. Just come home.”
I looked at him steadily. “Has Judy left?”
He shifted on the couch. He couldn’t hold my eyes. “No. She… she says the house is still under renovation. It’s not ready yet.”
I let out a sharp, disbelieving laugh. “Really. It’s still not ready. Mark, don’t you think that’s a little bit strange? It’s been a month. How bad was this fire, exactly, that a whole month later the house still isn’t livable? You’ve never even shown me a photo of the damage. Neither has she.”
Mark rubbed his temples with both hands. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know how bad it was. I haven’t been down there. But Kate, I miss you. I miss Riley. I miss my family. I want you home.”
I shook my head slowly. “I’m not coming back to that house while she’s still in it. I’m sorry. I won’t. And it is not my fault that she has somehow become a bigger priority to you than your own wife and your own daughter.”
See more on the next page