It is the invisibility.

Because generosity that hides itself completely does not teach the people around you gratitude; it teaches them that the abundance they enjoy simply falls from the sky, requires nothing, costs no one anything.

I thought my silence was humility.

It was, in practice, a lesson — and what I was patiently teaching my husband and his entire family, year after invisible year, was that everything they had came from nowhere and could never run out.

I was, without meaning to, training the very people who would one day rob me to believe that robbing me was not even possible, because they had never once been allowed to see that the well had a bottom, or an owner, or a name.