He Laughed and Asked What Money I Thought I Was Leaving With Since I “Didn’t Even Have a Job” – He Never Knew the Dependent Wife He’d Built a Cage Around Was Sitting on Sixty-One Million Dollars

I have thought a great deal, since, about how a scarcity like that gets built, because it did not happen in a day and I did not walk into it a fool.

It is built the way water shapes stone, by a steady pressure applied over years, so gently at each moment that you never feel the thing bending.

First it is reasonable to let him handle the finances, because he works and you’re home and someone has to.

Then it is reasonable to have a budget, because of the mortgage, because of the future, because you must be careful.

Then the budget is tight, and being careful becomes being anxious, and anxious becomes guilty, until one day you are a grown woman standing in a store feeling ashamed to want a thing, apologizing inside your own head for the sin of desiring something beautiful.