Don’t Let Your Mother Answer for You

Did not answer eleven calls.

Changed my number, my email and my mailing address in a four-minute administrative transaction.

Refused mediation twice.

Signed a decree without reading past the first page.

Failed to notice, across sixteen months of weekly phone calls, that my mother had never once said a neutral thing about my wife.

And then — this is the item on that list I care about most — knew, from the January of the fourth year, that I had been wrong about all of it, and did nothing for three years and eleven months.

Jessi read that list twice.