My Mother-in-Law Left a Blue Notebook in Our Hallway Closet—After My Son Was Born, I Finally Learned What She Had Been Recording Inside It

Unauthorized entry remained unauthorized entry.

Monitoring remained monitoring.

Smearing pigment onto another person’s newborn remained exactly that.

Eventually, she stopped trying to win the vocabulary.

That was when real accountability began.

I do not know whether she became a better person.

I am suspicious of those conclusions.

Human beings are not software updates.