Chapter 5 - Aunt Diane
Diane was sixty-eight.
Married to Wesley’s uncle Thomas for forty-six years.
I had met her perhaps eight times.
Quiet.
Dry humor.
Always left family gatherings early.
She told me the original story.
Margaret had it wrong.
Or had changed it.
Diane’s mother-in-law—Wesley’s grandmother Patricia—gave Diane a collar at her engagement dinner.
Not because Diane said Thomas was on a leash.
Because Patricia believed Diane was:
“too opinionated.”
The tag read:
TRAINING REQUIRED.
Guests laughed.
Diane cried in bathroom.
Thomas convinced her to return.
Then Patricia put the collar loosely around Diane’s neck for a photograph.
Diane smiled because twenty people were watching.
The photograph became family lore.
Everyone told story as:
“Diane gave as good as she got.”
She had not.
“I hated it.”
“Did Margaret know?”
“She was nineteen. She was there.”
There.
“Did you tell her later?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“After she gave a collar to another daughter-in-law.”
Margaret had repeated ritual with cousin Paul’s wife, Elise, twenty-eight years later.
That collar said:
HOUSEBROKEN.
Elise laughed publicly.
Then stopped attending family Christmas for four years.
Again:
Family called her sensitive.
Diane confronted Margaret privately.
“This wasn’t funny when Patricia did it to me.”
Margaret replied:
“You’re remembering it wrong.”
Gaslighting by tradition.
If enough people tell a humiliating story as comedy, the person humiliated becomes unreliable narrator of her own experience.
Diane said:
“When I saw the group chat, I left.”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
Silence.
Then:
“I should have.”
There.
Another adult who assumed someone else would stop Margaret.
Pattern.
“I thought Wesley knew.”
“He did partly.”
Diane sighed.
“I’m sorry.”
I believed her.
May you like
Still hurt.
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