I paid my son’s rent for three years, and when his new wife smiled and told me I wasn’t special enough to be at their wedding, I smiled back. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d already started adding things up, and that the sum was going to surprise us both.
You have to understand what those three years looked like from the inside, because from the outside I imagine they looked like a generous mother helping her son get started. That’s what I told myself too, for a long time. It was the story that made the monthly transfers feel like love rather than what they actually were, which was the gradual hollowing out of everything my late husband Klaus had worked to leave me.
Continue on the next page:
