The retirement funds for Trent’s business.

Bianca’s debts.

Wade’s car.

They described every one of those gifts, in a legal filing, as proof of, and I am quoting the affidavit, ‘erratic, uninhibited financial squandering.'” I sat very still.

For ten years I had bled my savings dry for those three children.

I had gone without so that they would not have to.

I had called it love, and I had been proud, privately, to be the kind of mother who gave until it hurt.

And they had taken every single act of that love, written it down, and handed it to a court as evidence that I had lost my mind.