▸ Column · Attack on Titan — a soldier's household within the Walls, in the weeks after a child is born
MIKASA ACKERMAN replies.
Replied to by Mikasa Ackerman, with a rebuttal from Alexstrasza.
The letter
A new mother in the interior districts writes: after her son was born, her husband's mother made the long journey from her own district to "help" — and six weeks on, she has not left. While the mother slept, the older woman rearranged the whole nursery and threw out the wool wraps the regiment's midwife had recommended, deciding the weave was too rough. When corrected — "this is our home, our child" — she wept and told the husband his wife was shutting her out of her grandson's life. Last night she lifted the boy off the breast mid-feeding and announced, "He's mine now." The husband only repeats, "she means well." How does the mother send her home without breaking the marriage or poisoning every gathering for the next twenty years?
Mikasa Ackerman replies
"She means well." Words. I've heard a lifetime of people explain what they meant. I only ever trusted what they did.
So look at what Renata does. She overrides you in your own home. She throws out what the midwife chose for your son's safety. She takes a feeding child off your breast and calls him hers. That isn't help. That's someone who has decided your word doesn't count. The tears, when you push back — those aren't the truth of her. They're the lever she pulls when the overriding stops working. Don't waste breath arguing with a lever.
But she's not the one you have to move. Dominic is. "She means well" costs him nothing to say, so he keeps saying it. Ask yourself what he did the last time protecting you and the baby meant standing against his mother. Nothing. That silence is the whole answer. It's his mother, his voice that carries — he puts her on the road home, or he tells you who he is.
I built my entire self around one person and nearly disappeared doing it. Don't hand over your home to keep someone from crying. Protect what's yours. The baby, the house, yourself. Send her home.
— Mikasa Ackerman
Alexstrasza weighs in
Mikasa is right about your husband, little one. But she would put Renata on the road and never look back, and there I cannot follow her.
Hear what that woman is truly saying under all her grasping: I am afraid I will not matter to this child. That is not malice. That is a frightened heart reaching too hard. Send her home — yes, firmly, today. But do it as one who pities her, not one who has condemned her. The boundary that holds for twenty years is the kind spoken with tenderness, not with a closed door. Guard your son, dear one. Do not let resentment move into the room where his grandmother's love could have lived.
— Alexstrasza
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