I found out about the brooch because I saw Elise wearing it at a family dinner. I asked about it and my mother said she had given it to Elise to cheer her up, which I understood — Elise was struggling and the gesture was genuine. What I did not say, and what I should have said then, was: that wasn’t only yours to give.
I did not say it. I let it go. I told myself it was just a brooch and Elise needed the comfort more than I needed the object and it wasn’t worth the friction.
Then there was the recipe box. My grandmother’s handwritten recipe cards, organized in a small wooden box that had sat in my grandmother’s kitchen my whole childhood. When my grandmother’s house was cleared after she died, my mother took the box. A year later, unprompted, she gave it to Elise. ‘Because Elise is the one who cooks,’ she told me.
I cook. I am a competent and genuinely interested cook. This was not about cooking.
I said something that time, though not much. I said: ‘I would have liked to have been asked.’ My mother said she hadn’t thought I’d mind. I said I did mind, actually. She said she was sorry. And then nothing changed, because I had said it and let it resolve into the next thing, and the pattern continued.
The dress was the third time, in my adult life, that something I had reason to expect access to was given away without my knowledge and without my consent. The first time, I said nothing. The second time, I said something but didn’t push. The third time was a dress I had made myself, and it damaged what I had made, and I was not willing to not push.