I took a deep breath and told her that my pregnancy post had absolutely nothing to do with my sister. My mother scoffed loudly into the receiver and said that was a technicality, which was honestly almost impressive in its delusion. Apparently, being pregnant in public had become a technicality that I was using as a weapon.
"She is going through something you can't possibly understand," my mother hissed, her voice dripping with venomous sympathy for her favorite child. "You could show a little sensitivity. You know she's struggling." I gripped the cold granite edge of the kitchen counter until my knuckles turned white and reminded her as calmly and evenly as humanly possible that Chloe had never once contacted me about her fertility problems.
We barely spoke. In fact, we had barely spoken for five agonizing years. My mother sharply answered that I knew enough and that decent, kind people didn't maliciously rub their happiness in someone else's face. Marcus walked into the kitchen halfway through this unhinged call.
He took one look at my pale face, my rigid posture, and stopped dead in his tracks. He pointed at the phone and mouthed, "Your mom?" I gave a tight, miserable nod. He rolled his eyes so hard and so dramatically that I almost smiled despite the knot in my stomach. Then my mother delivered the final blow.
"Everything always has to be about you, Elena." And there it was, the grand family anthem, the slogan of my entire existence. I wish I could sit here and say I gave her a mature, measured, emotionally intelligent answer. I did not. I snapped.
I told her that if my mere existence and my growing family were personally offensive to my sister, then maybe my sister should stop obsessively checking my social media page. My mother gasped dramatically, sucking in air like I had just thrown a glass of ice water directly into her face. I didn't stop. I followed it up by explicitly stating that I was not going to hide my baby, my joy, or my life just to make my sister more comfortable in her stolen marriage.
And if she expected me to shrink myself for Chloe's benefit ever again, she could stay mad forever. Then, my hands shaking uncontrollably, I hung up the phone. Marcus walked over, gently took the phone from my trembling fingers, kissed my forehead, and guided me to sit down on the bar stool. Before we could even process the adrenaline, Leo came bounding into the kitchen, his eyes wide with innocent curiosity, asking if the new baby could hear him yet.
That single pure question saved the rest of the afternoon. I took his little hand and placed it flat against my stomach, even though there was absolutely nothing to feel yet but the wool of my sweater. For 20 minutes, Leo leaned in and talked directly to my belly about a superhero cartoon he had watched earlier that morning, explaining the plot in excruciating, adorable detail. I remember looking down at his messy hair and thinking that this was supposed to be a happy milestone day.
Then I immediately felt a crushing wave of guilt for letting my mother steal even 10 minutes of my joy. But the harsh truth is that the phone call didn't create the problem. It only violently ripped the polite cover off a rotting wound that had been festering there for years.
You see, my sister Chloe had always been the one my mother worried about. If I had a hard day at school or work, I was deemed strong enough to handle it independently. If Chloe had a hard day, the entire house changed temperature to accommodate her fragile emotional state. When we were teenagers, Chloe could scream at the top of her lungs, violently slam doors off their hinges, skip school for days, and sob hysterically in my mother's bed for 3 hours, and everybody treated it like a DEFCON 1 crisis.