“Perfect, I have already sold my house, so I will move in with you on the same day as the move.”
Monica announced it over the phone with an offensive glee, acting as if she were granting us a magnificent favor rather than staged an invasion. I was in the kitchen sorting through financial records when I saw my husband’s face tighten into a hard, almost unrecognizable mask.
Silently, Silas switched the call to speakerphone without saying a word to me while his mother continued speaking with her usual nonchalance. She was a master at disguising her blatant abuse of trust with warm words like unity, family, and mutual support.
For the past three years, every success in our lives had been viewed by her as an automatic extension of her own personal rights. When Silas received a major promotion at the architectural firm in Houston, Monica immediately began to hint that he could now afford to help her more.
When we traded our old sedan for a luxury SUV, she asked about the keys to the old one before we had even decided whether to sell it or keep it. When we finally told her we had purchased a high-end property, she did not offer a single word of congratulations to us.
“Does it have a guest suite, or am I finally going to live the way I truly deserve?” she asked as her very first question.
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.
It was not that she actually felt lonely in her home, but rather that she craved total control over our daily lives. The night Silas told me she had officially put her house on the market, we sat in the dark living room of our apartment for a long time.
