My Daughter Wrote: “Don’t You Dare Come To Us For Christmas! We Don’t Want To See You!’ My Son…

Just us. You’re always so needy and demanding. We need space. Don’t call. Don’t text. just leave us alone for the holidays. I sat down heavily on my kitchen chair, the phone nearly slipping from my grip. Needy, demanding. I had asked to see my own family for Christmas. Was that demanding? I waited for Brian to call to check on me to at least acknowledge what his sister had said.

We had a family group chat. He had surely seen the message. Silence. Hours passed, then a full day. Brian said nothing. His silence felt like agreement, like betrayal, just as sharp as Jessica’s words. That night, I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, Tom’s side of the bed cold and empty as it had been for 7 years.

What had I done wrong? Had I been too available, too giving? Or had I simply been too blind to see what my children had become? The next morning, I sat at my kitchen table with my coffee and my laptop. I opened my bank account and looked at the automatic transfers I had set up years ago. 1,500 to Jessica, 1,000 to Brian, month after month, year after year, I thought about the text message, about Brian’s silence, about how neither of them had asked how I was doing in months.

And then with a clarity that surprised me, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I canled every automatic payment, all of them. Then I texted back, just one word, okay. After I pressed send on that single word, okay. I sat motionless for several minutes, my heart pounding. What had I just done? But as the initial shock faded, something else took its place. Not anger, not yet.

First came curiosity, a cold, analytical curiosity I hadn’t felt in years. I opened my banking app and began to scroll, not just through recent months, but years. I exported statements, created a spreadsheet, something Tom had taught melong ago when we used to manage our household budget together. The numbers that emerged made me feel physically ill.

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