I am not naive about what comes next.
Babies create needs. They create expenses. They make tired people more emotional and old habits easier to fall back into.
I know there may be moments when Derek asks for help.
There may be moments when Brianna assumes I will step in.
And there may be moments when saying no feels terrible.
The difference is that I understand something now that I did not understand before Easter.
No is not the opposite of love.
Protecting my financial stability is not the same as abandoning my son.
Refusing to absorb somebody else’s lifestyle is not cruelty.
For a long time, I believed my generosity was proof of my love.
Now I think some of it was also a way of buying my place in their lives.
If I paid the bill, I was needed.
If I was needed, I belonged.
That is a painful thing to admit because it means Brianna was not the only person participating in the arrangement.
She took advantage of it.
Derek accepted it.
But I kept saying yes.
I kept telling myself I was the only one preventing disaster.
I kept making myself indispensable, then quietly resenting that nobody seemed grateful enough for everything I did.
The truth is more complicated than one villain and one victim.
But the chair was simple.
That chair showed me, in one humiliating second, what money could not buy.
Belonging.
You cannot purchase it with down payments, HVAC repairs, property taxes, credit cards, lease signatures, HOA dues, landscaping bills, or anything else.
It either exists or it does not.
And if you have to keep paying admission to stay in someone’s life, you are not standing inside the kind of love you think you are protecting.
My Oregon trip leaves in 11 days.
The suitcase is already open on the guest-room bed.
I downloaded three novels I have been meaning to read for years. I booked a cabin on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.
Every time I picture that view, I feel something I had almost forgotten how to feel.
Anticipation.
Not worry.
Not guilt.