For Months My Mother Quietly Built the Case Against My Husband — Then Made Sure the Truth Would Reach Me No Matter What He Did

I have thought a great deal, since, about how perfectly money works as a leash, precisely because it can always be dressed as responsibility.

If Richard had simply forbidden me to see my mother, I would have recognized it as tyranny, and fought him, and perhaps left him years sooner.

But he never forbade anything outright.

He controlled the money, and money controls everything else, and controlling money is the one form of domination our whole culture applauds a man for. We need to be careful with our finances.

You can’t just spend without discussing it.

I’m only thinking about our future. Every one of those sentences sounds responsible, mature, even loving, and every one of them was a link in a chain.