Brother Told My Kids “Your Mom Is the Family Failure” — He Forgot Who Owns His Company…
Sunday dinner at my parents’ house had always been mandatory in the same way jury duty and dental cleanings were mandatory. Nobody liked it, but skipping wasn’t an option. Even after their divorce, even with two kids to wrangle and a full-time job that left me exhausted most nights, I still showed up every week because my mother insisted family time mattered.
She’d set the dining room table with her good china, the kind she only brought out for holidays and, apparently, weekly rituals. She’d polish the silver, fold cloth napkins into little fans, and make pot roast with carrots and potatoes that had simmered all afternoon. The smell of slow-cooked beef and buttered rolls would hit you the second you walked through the front door, wrapping around you like nostalgia and obligation.
From the outside, our family probably looked like a commercial. Suburban house in Colorado, manicured lawn, tasteful wreath on the door. Inside, we were a long-running sitcom that had gone on too many seasons—same cast, same conflicts, slightly worse dialogue.
My parents, Linda and Robert Morrison, had divorced five years earlier but never quite figured out how to untangle their lives. Dad moved into a condo downtown. Mom stayed in the house “for stability,” as she put it, but really because she loved that dining room table and the illusion that we were still something resembling a unit.
“Six o’clock sharp, Sarah,” she’d remind me every Sunday morning, as if I hadn’t been doing this for decades. “The kids like routine.”
The kids did like routine. So did she.
And so did my brother, Nathan—though his routine revolved more around being admired than being on time. That particular Sunday, I arrived five minutes early, as usual. Emma, my ten-year-old, bounced through the front door ahead of me, her brown ponytail swinging.
Michael, seven, clutched his favorite dinosaur in one hand and my fingers in the other. “Grandma! Did you make the rolls with the butter inside?” Emma yelled before we’d even fully crossed the threshold.
“In the oven right now,” Mom called from the kitchen. “Shoes off, hands washed. Hi, sweetheart.”
She kissed my cheek as I walked in, the familiar scent of her floral perfume mixing with the savory smell of dinner.
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