Sixty-seven times the next day.
Seventy-three times the day after that.
I blocked their numbers.
Then came the emails, the Facebook messages, and the texts from relatives I hadn’t heard from in years, all saying the same thing.
How could I abandon my parents?
How could I be so cruel?
How could I let them lose their home?
Not one person asked how my baby was doing.
Not one asked if I was okay.
Not one acknowledged that my mother had chosen a Broadway show over a medical emergency.
I was in the hospital for eight days.
Baby Ethan was in the NICU for five weeks.
Marcus was there for two weeks before he had to return to his deployment.
During all of that, my parents called and called and called, but never once did they ask about their grandson.
It was always about money.
Three weeks after the surgery, my mother showed up at my house.
I was home with the twins while Ethan was still in the NICU. I looked through the peephole and saw her standing there, my father behind her looking defeated.
I opened the door but didn’t invite them in.
“What?”
“We need to talk,” my mother said, trying to push past me.
I blocked the doorway.
“Talk here.”
“Rebecca, please don’t be childish. We drove all the way here.”
“You drove twenty minutes. The same twenty minutes you couldn’t spare when I was in danger.”
“Stop saying you were in danger. You’re fine.”
“I had a seizure on the operating table, Mom. My blood pressure was 220 over 140. The doctor said I was minutes away from a major emergency. Your grandson was born two months premature and is in the NICU with breathing tubes. But sure, I’m fine.”
My father finally spoke.
“Sweetheart, please. We’re going to lose the house. We need you to start the payments again. Just until we figure something else out.”
“Figure out what, Dad? You’re both retired. You have no other income. You’ve been living beyond your means on my money for nine years. If I start paying again, it’ll never end.”
“But we have nowhere else to go,” my mother cried.
“Maybe Amanda can help. She’s the creative one, right? The special one.”
“Amanda doesn’t have any money.”
“Neither do I, Mom. Not anymore. I have three children, a deployed husband, and a four-thousand-two-hundred-ninety-dollar nanny bill because you wouldn’t help me for four hours. I have a NICU bill that’s currently at one hundred twenty-seven thousand dollars. I have a mortgage of my own because I finally bought a house. Something I could have done years ago if I hadn’t been funding your lifestyle.”
“This is our home, Rebecca.”
“And it would have been gone nine years ago if I hadn’t saved it. You’ve had nine extra years there because of me. That’s nine years more than you would have had.”
My mother’s face twisted.
“You’ve always been selfish. Rigid. This is exactly why we’ve never been close.”
Something inside me cracked open.
“We’ve never been close because you never wanted to be close to me. I’m not artistic like Amanda. I’m not fun or spontaneous. I’m just reliable, boring Rebecca who pays the bills and doesn’t complain. Well, I’m done. I’m done paying for a relationship that has always been one-sided.”
“If you don’t help us, we’ll be homeless.”
“Then I guess you’ll figure it out. You’re adults.”
I closed the door.
My mother pounded on it for fifteen minutes while Olivia and Noah stared at me with confused faces.
“Why is Grandma yelling?” Olivia asked.
“Because she wants something I can’t give her anymore,” I said.
“Is it love?” Noah asked, in that eerily perceptive way three-year-olds sometimes have.
I swallowed hard.
“Yeah, buddy. Something like that.”
The calls continued.
My mother called eighty-two times in a single day.
When I blocked her on everything, she started showing up at my house. I stopped answering the door.
She left notes.
“You’re destroying this family.”
“Your father is having chest pains from the stress.”
“How can you live with yourself?”
Then came the social media campaign.
My mother posted a long, detailed Facebook post about her ungrateful, selfish daughter who had abandoned her elderly parents in their time of need.
She painted herself as the loving mother who had sacrificed everything and was now being punished by a heartless child.
She left out the Hamilton tickets.
She definitely left out the four hundred eighty-six thousand dollars.
Extended family I barely knew started commenting.
“Elders deserve respect.”
“Family takes care of family.”
“What happened to family values?”
I didn’t respond.
I was too busy with NICU visits, taking care of the twins, and trying to keep myself together while my husband was overseas.
But then, four weeks after Ethan’s birth, something happened that changed everything.
I was at the hospital, sitting next to Ethan’s isolette in the NICU, when a nurse came in and said I had a visitor.
“He says he’s your grandfather. Should I send him in?”
“My grandfather?”
My mother’s father had supposedly died when I was six.
My father’s father had died before I was born.
“What’s his name?” I asked, confused.
“Frank. Frank Morrison.”
My heart stopped.
Frank Morrison was my mother’s father.
But he wasn’t dead.
That was just what my mother told everyone.
There had been some kind of massive falling-out when I was young, and my mother had cut him off completely. She told the entire family he was dead and forbade anyone from contacting him.
“Yes,” I said quickly. “Please send him in.”
An elderly man walked in.
Eighty-one years old, but standing straight and tall. He had kind eyes and my mother’s nose.
He looked at Ethan in the isolette, then at me, and his eyes filled with tears.
“Rebecca,” he said softly. “I know you probably don’t remember me. You were so young when your mother decided I was dead.”
“I remember you,” I said.
And I did.
Vague memories of a man who brought me books and played board games with me. Then suddenly he was gone, and we were told he had passed away.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Your aunt Linda called me. Your mother’s sister. She told me what happened. The emergency C-section. Your mother choosing Broadway tickets over helping you. The money you’ve been sending all these years. She thought I should know.”
He pulled up a chair and sat next to me.
“I need to tell you something about your mother,” he said. “She wasn’t always like this. When she was young, she was sweet. Kind. But after her mother and I divorced, something changed. She became entitled. Manipulative. She learned to play the victim and make everyone else feel guilty for not giving her what she wanted.”
“Why did you and Grandma divorce?” I asked.
I had never known the real story.
“Because I couldn’t watch her turn your mother into a monster. Your grandmother enabled every bad behavior. When your mother stole from her college roommate, your grandmother blamed the roommate. When your mother maxed out credit cards in my name, your grandmother said I should just pay them. I finally left when your mother was nineteen. Your grandmother turned her against me. Told her I’d abandoned them. Your mother believed it.”
He looked at me intently.
