My pregnant daughter-in-law told my son she needed “peace and quiet” and that I had to move out of the four-bedroom house my late husband and I had paid off years ago.

I’d acted like the unpaid staff of a woman who increasingly treated me as an inconvenience.

When I stopped, the amount of invisible work I had been doing became obvious.

Boundaries are funny that way.

They can sound small when you describe them individually.

Buy your own groceries.

Wash your own clothes.

Pay your own bills.

Don’t enter my bedroom.

But together, those boundaries had weight.

And Harper kept running into them.

The baby shower

The baby shower happened on a Saturday.

Harper never asked if she could host it