My Husband Kept the Peace by Making Me Absorb Every Conflict With His Mother — So I Stopped Paying the Bill
She’s strong.
She doesn’t need help the way others do.
It is meant, usually, as a compliment.
It functions as a sentence.
Because the unspoken corollary of she’s strong, she’ll be fine is therefore we need not trouble ourselves on her behalf — and a person can be strong enough to survive almost anything and still be slowly starved of the ordinary care that even the strong need, simply because their strength has been read as self-sufficiency, and their self-sufficiency as permission to neglect them.
Dorian had defended his mother, who was weak and loud, and left his wife undefended, who was strong and quiet, and had told himself this was reasonable, because Marisol could take it and Gwendolyn could not.
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