“Money’s too tight for your gifts,” my son’s wife texted.
Forty-eight hours later, I saw she’d bought her mom a Surface Pro, iPad, and headphones.
I cancelled their chalet reservation.
That night, my son called: “Mom, what did you do?!”
The text arrived on a Wednesday morning while I was sitting at my kitchen table in Brockville, watching the St. Lawrence River freeze at the edges through the frost on the window glass. I had just wrapped both hands around a mug of Earl Grey when my phone lit up on the placemat beside me. I read it twice.
Rosalind, Carter and I won’t be doing Christmas gifts for you this year. Money has been really strained lately.
No greeting, no softening, just my first name dropped at the front of a sentence that landed like a door closed quietly but firmly in my face.
My son Carter and his wife Yvette had been married for four years. They both worked. Carter as a project manager at an engineering firm in Ottawa, Yvette as a dental hygienist at a busy clinic nearby. They lived in a four-bedroom detached house in a nice part of the West End, drove matching Subarus, and took two holidays a year without fail. The mortgage they carried was entirely manageable. I knew because Carter and I had gone over the numbers when they bought the place, sitting at this very table with his laptop open between us, both of us running figures until we were satisfied he could handle it comfortably. Money being tight was possible, I suppose. Life has a way of humbling everyone, and I tried, genuinely, to extend them that grace.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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