For three long years, I’ve been trapped in a nightmare that refuses to end. It all began the day my son, Thomas, a grown man of thirty-five, brought his new wife into our two-bedroom home in London. A woman named Emily, with two children from a past marriage. At first, he promised it was temporary. Temporary. How often we women believe that word…
Three years have passed. Our flat is no longer a home—it’s a battlefield. Me, my son, his wife, her two children, and now… she’s pregnant again. God, in my old age, has denied me peace, comfort, even a moment to breathe.
Emily isn’t ill. She’s barely thirty, yet she refuses to work. “Too busy with the kids,” she says. But the children leave for nursery each morning while she stays—not at a job, but at the salon, or coffee shops, or friends’ flats.
Thomas swore things would change—paperwork sorted, jobs found, a mortgage taken. I believed him. Mothers always hope. But one year bled into the next, and now the third drags on. Only Emily’s belly grows.
She’s never outright cruel—polite, even. But she does nothing. No sweeping, no dishes, no cooking. The children? Left to cartoons while she scrolls her phone. By evening, it’s silence from her, screams from them.
The housework is mine alone. Up at dawn, scrubbing floors in two offices, home by eight, no time for tea before the next chore: washing, cooking, scrubbing grease from the kitchen. By nine, I might sit—if I don’t collapse first. Sometimes I just stand in the kitchen and weep.
My pension vanishes into bills and groceries. Thomas’s wages don’t stretch this far. Emily, now “on maternity leave,” hadn’t even a job to leave.
I tried reasoning with him. Told him the flat’s too small, my health failing—the doctor warned me after my blood pressure spiked at the stove. He shrugged.
*Mum, you don’t own this place alone. We’re not leaving. No money. Deal with it.*
That was the conversation.
That was my thanks.
That was my son.
I dream of escape. A loan, a dingy bedsit—anything for silence. Just walls without voices. Another child here would break me. This isn’t living. It’s surviving.
I don’t live anymore. I serve. A slave in my own home, in my own twilight years. The cruelest part? None of them even wonder how I bear it. They just wait—for meals, for clean floors, for my silence.
I want to scream. Instead, I press my lips shut. I keep going because if I don’t, there’s only filth, hunger, cold. Because I’m a mother. A grandmother. Because I’m alone.
