Three weeks ago, my brother changed the locks on the apartment I own, moved in with his three kids, and turned my bedroom into what he kept calling his studio.
When I came home early and stood in my own doorway, he looked me up and down and told me, “This place suits me and my kids better than you.” Behind him, my mother nodded along. “You’re single, Ramona. You don’t need something this big.” I didn’t argue. I didn’t beg to be let into my own home.
I just picked up the one box they’d shoved onto the balcony, and I walked back to the elevator. What neither of them understood, standing there so sure of themselves, was exactly whose building they were standing in.
Before I go any further, if your chest just tightened the way mine did in that hallway, take one second to like this video and subscribe, and tell me in the comments where you’re listening from and what time it is there right now.
I always want to know who’s sitting with me while I tell this. I’m Ramona Sanchez, 36.
Chapter 2: Roots of a family dynamic
This is the story of the home my family decided I didn’t deserve and the hour it took for them to learn how wrong they were. To understand any of it, we have to go back 6 years to the first time my mother taught me to hide the things I love. People who meet me now assume I’ve always been the calm one.
The one who doesn’t raise her voice, who lets the long silences sit, who waits. They’re right about the calm. They’re wrong about where it came from.
I learned to be quiet the way some kids learn to swim because someone kept letting go of me in deep water. And eventually, I stopped expecting a hand. There’s a photograph my mother keeps on the mantle of her house in the Denver suburbs.
Three kids on a porch step. My brother Aaron is in the center, grinning, arms thrown wide like the whole frame belongs to him. I’m off to the right edge, half in shadow, leaning out of the shot as if the camera had already decided I was optional.
Nobody arranged us that way. We just fell into the positions we always held. Aaron at the heart of everything. Me at the margin, present and unnecessary. By the time I was old enough to notice, the pattern had already hardened into the shape of our family. When Aaron wanted the bigger room, he got the bigger room.
When Aaron’s grades slipped, my parents hired a tutor. When mine slipped, my mother told me she expected better because I was the one who could handle expectations.
That was the trick of it, you understand? The neglect always arrived wrapped as a compliment. You’re so independent, she’d say while she drove Aaron to practice and left me to find my own way home. You’re the strong one, she’d say every time being strong meant going without. I want to be fair to her because the version of this story where she’s a cartoon villain isn’t the true one, and the true one is worse. My mother, Vivien, is charming.
She runs the silent auction at her church’s fundraiser every spring. People in that world adore her. They send her thank you notes. She has a way of making a stranger feel like the most important person in the room. And she saved exactly none of that warmth for the daughter who would have lived on it.