What I kept coming back to, all that long night, wasn’t the Christmas dinner.
It was everything before it.
The year before, and the year before that.
Todd’s thirty-sixth birthday party. Stacy had planned it at a restaurant downtown. There were twenty people at a long table. I was seated at the very far end, next to a man from Todd’s office I’d never met, who talked about fantasy football for two hours.
I didn’t get to say one word to my son all evening. When it was time for cake, I couldn’t even see him over all the heads.
The Thanksgiving after that. Stacy rearranged the seating cards three times while I watched. Each time, my card ended up one seat further from Todd. The third time, I was sitting right next to the swinging door to the kitchen. Every time someone went through for more gravy, it bumped my chair.
“Oh, Theodora, I’m so sorry,” Stacy said, the first time it hit me. “It’s just the only seat that works.”
The Easter brunch I found out about from Facebook. A photo of everyone around a table in pastel sweaters. Captioned “Family is everything .”
I wasn’t in the photo. I hadn’t been invited.
When I asked Todd about it on the phone, he said, “Oh. It was kind of last minute, Mom. Stacy’s parents were in town. I figured you’d be busy.”
I wasn’t busy.
It was the gradual, quiet way I’d been moved to the edges of everything. Inch by inch. Seat by seat. So slowly that I could almost pretend it wasn’t happening.
And I had pretended.
I kept telling myself it wasn’t on purpose.
I kept finding other explanations.
Stacy was tired. Stacy was stressed with her job. Todd had a lot going on at work. They had a young child. People get busy. Families change. That’s just how it is.
Sitting at my kitchen table at two in the morning on Christmas Day, I realized something that made me feel a little sick.
I had spent two whole years making excuses for people who had never once made a single excuse for me.
At four o’clock in the morning, I got up and made a cup of tea.
I didn’t drink it. I just held it.
And what I thought about, strangely, was not my family at all.
What I thought about was a folder sitting on my laptop.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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