Chapter 1: The Day She Wore Black to a Welcome Home
I gave birth to triplet girls after serious complications, and we were kept in the hospital for weeks — everyone came to celebrate the day we brought them home, except my mother-in-law came to ruin it.
We tried for a long time.
Years.
At some point you stop telling people you're trying.
And then it worked.
And it was three.
Three girls.
I'm still not over that part, honestly.
The pregnancy was rough.
Three babies, and they were big — by the end I was eating constantly and still starving, and I couldn't walk to the mailbox without stopping.
Nobody prepares you for that.
They all came out healthy.
Chunky, actually.
The nurses kept commenting on it.
They kept us in the hospital a while.
The girls needed monitoring and I was wrecked — some days I couldn't sit up on my own.
My husband was there every day.
Every single day, with a list of questions for the doctors in his phone.
His mother never came.
Not once.
She wanted a grandson.
She's been saying it for years.
"Every family needs an heir." Three granddaughters apparently don't count as anything in her head.
So when we finally got the discharge date, my husband wanted to make a whole thing of it.
And I wanted that too.
Balloons, cake, everyone at the house, then dinner at a restaurant after.
We asked people to wear pink or white.
Three girls.
It was for the photos.
He invited his mother.
She didn't say yes and she didn't say no for two weeks.
We kept asking each other whether she'd show up.
Discharge day.
My mom was there.
My sister.
His dad.
Everyone in pink and white, balloons on the porch, my aunt crying before we'd even gotten the car doors open.
And then his mother arrived.
In a long black cape.
Buttoned up to the throat, in October, standing on the path.
She didn't say hello to anyone.
Not to me, not to my mother, not to the girls.
She just stood there holding it closed.
You could see there was something under it.
It didn't sit right.
Somebody offered to take it.
She said no.
Then the photographer started getting us together for the first family photo.
My husband had one of the girls; my sister had another.
His mother stepped into the middle of the group — and that's when she opened the cape.
---
What was she hiding under that cape?
May you like
And what did my husband do when he saw it?
Comment **"NEXT"** if you want Part 2 — it's in the comments.
