I am fifty-four years old and I always thought that at that age one learns to read people well, to judge their character and to avoid silly mistakes.
It turns out I was completely wrong.
My name is Margaret and, for three years after my divorce, I lived with my daughter, Emma, and her husband, Tom, in their modest two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.
They were kind and caring; they were wonderful to me. They never complained and never made me feel uncomfortable.
But I always felt like I was in the way.
Young people need their own space, their privacy, their freedom to be newlyweds without their mother-in-law sleeping in their study.
I was never told I was a burden, not once, but I noticed it in the small details.
The way they lowered their voices when I entered a room, as if I'd interrupted an intimate conversation. The way Tom's face tensed slightly when I asked if they needed anything from the shop. The way Emma apologized so enthusiastically when she accidentally woke me up after I'd come home late from dinner with friends, as if my sleep was more important than her right to live freely in her own home.
I didn't want to wait until someone had to say it out loud, until the resentment built up so much that my daughter had to sit her down and gently suggest that she find her own place.
I wanted to leave with dignity, with dignity, before I became the mother who stays too long but is welcome.
So when my colleague Sandra mentioned that she had a single and "very nice" brother, I was surprised that I had paid any attention to her.
“You two would make a good couple,” she said during lunch in the break room of the insurance company where we both worked as claims adjusters. “He’s the same age as you, he’s divorced like you, and he has a stable job. Nothing out of the ordinary, just stable.”
At first I laughed, genuinely amused by the whole idea.
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