My husband, Caleb, had always been a man of gentle smiles and soft promises. Or so I thought. In reality, he was a man made of paper, easily folded and manipulated by the iron hands of his mother, Margaret.
Margaret was a wealthy widow, a matriarch who ruled her estate and her son with a checkbook in one hand and a gavel of judgment in the other. She never hid her disdain for me. To her, I was simply “the nurse.” I was the middle-class girl with calloused hands and student loans, a woman who had “trapped” her golden boy in a life of mediocrity. She tolerated me when I was just a wife, but when I became pregnant, the dynamic shifted.
She insisted the timing was “inconvenient for Caleb’s future.” She spoke of babies as if they were bad investments, liabilities that would drain her son’s potential.
