Chapter 2
I never asked either of them to call me Mom.
I only wanted basic respect.
Jason was the first one to stop pretending he intended to offer it. One evening after dinner I asked him to help clear the kitchen and he didn't look up from his phone and said, in the flat voice of someone who has decided the conversation is already over, "You don't make rules here." I stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment and then I went to talk to Daniel and Daniel looked tired and said they were still adjusting and I should try not to take everything personally.
Alyssa followed her brother's lead, the way younger siblings do when they are watching someone test a boundary and waiting to see what happens when you cross it. One afternoon she told me she listened to her dad, not me, with the casual certainty of someone stating a fact about the weather. When Olivia's Christmas art markers dried out because Alyssa left every cap off overnight and Olivia cried quietly at the dining room table, Alyssa's response to being told about it was to say that my mom didn't run this house.
May you like
Ethan asked me that night why they were allowed to talk to me the way they did when he'd get in trouble for talking to any adult that way. I did not have an answer. I had been so busy maintaining the structure of the household and the surface of the peace and the idea that we were a family that I had not let myself see what Ethan was already seeing clearly, which was that I had been teaching my own children, by example, that kindness meant accepting humiliation and that adults who loved you sometimes let you get treated badly because keeping the peace felt more important than keeping their dignity.
I walked through the front door on that Thursday evening expecting television noise and the smell of whatever I was going to make for dinner, and instead I found Ethan sitting on the living room floor with the broken wooden airplane in his lap.
