My evenings at home with my baby daughter Ivy were small miracles. Her soft laughter, the warm cocoa, and the quiet joy of a baby finally asleep seemed to be everything I have always longed for.

That evening, as my baby girl nestled in her ducky blanket, her breathing calm and gentle, and my husband Judson stirred cocoa in the kitchen, I lay on the couch and thought to myself, “So this is what happiness looks like.”

Indeed, the world was at my feet and I felt like the happiest person there was.

However, as days passed by, there came the nights that weren’t that peaceful. At first, I just thought I was just imagining things, and Judson tried to convince me that I was too tired to be thinking clearly, but I knew I wasn’t making things up, that faint rustling coming from my baby’s room was as real as that coffee mug I was holding in my hand. I could hear it, sense it, feel it…

As the noises from the nursery kept coming back night after night, Judson tried to convince me that it was the house settling, the pipes, or the old windows making it.

At the end of the day, the house was indeed an older one and things needed to be repaired, but that strange sound… it was definitely coming from my daughter’s room.

No matter how much everyone tried to convince me to let it go, I simply couldn’t, so I called Kaylie, my friend who knew everything about baby gadgets.

“Are you out of your mind?” she asked me when I told her I was suspecting someone was entering my house at night. She even started laughing, but still, she told me everything about that baby monitor she had purchased for herself months prior. It had night vision, audio, video — everything.

That night, I set it up carefully and felt a sense of security.

I went to bed, ready to have the much-needed sleep when I heard a scream. It was 03:15 in the morning and the baby monitor showed shadows.

I woke Judson up and rushed to Ivy’s room. She was disturbed by something and wouldn’t stop crying.

“You are making a big deal out of this,” Judson said. “She’s still just a baby, and babies cry… for no apparent reason.” He then asked me to stop being paranoid because it affected everyone. But I knew what I saw. There were shadows on the baby monitor, and I was certain someone was sneaking into my daughter’s room.

And then, I saw Ivy’s milk bottle was on the floor, and it was warm, as though someone had just warmed it for her.

I started panicking even more. Was I going mad?

Judson explanation was that perhaps I’d sleepwalked, maybe it was the hyper-vigilance of new motherhood. But I knew better. Someone was there, and I was about to prove him wrong.

I made sure everything was closed, the front door, the garage door, everything. And then, just as I approached the window, I saw it, a pendant — a cracked silver heart. I hadn’t seen that pendant in years. It belonged to someone who was not part of my life any longer.

Morning came and I left Ivy with the babysitter. “I’ll be back in no time,” I said. Then I got into my car and drove to the house I haven’t visited in what seemed like an eternity — my mother’s house.

Time seemed frozen there. Lace curtains, chipped ceramic owl on the porch. And my mother, waiting.

“You broke into my house,” I yelled.

“I just wanted to hold her, just once,” my mother said.

“But how did you get inside? How did you get past the security system?” I asked, needing answers.

But just as my mom was about to start speaking, Judson appeared at the house — “Honey, I can explain,” he said.

“What is going on? Judson, you knew my mother was the one getting inside our house and let me believe that I was imagining things? That I was going mad?”

It turned out Judson caught my mother sneaking, but she then told him the whole story about her life and he decided to trust her.

“What’s the whole story, Judson?” I asked. “Well, that’s not my story to tell,” he answered, leaving me alone with my mother.

What my mom said next changed my world. It turned out my father was having an affair with ant Jessie, the woman whom I frequently saw while growing up. The one I believed was like a mother to me. The same woman who kept telling me my mother left me and had nothing to do with me.

What Jessie and my father did was used their influence to put her in a psychiatric facility. They said she was unstable.

“They kept me locked away for five years. Jessie was head of the department. She and your father made sure I couldn’t see you. Couldn’t call you. Nothing.”

My mom also told me she watched me from a distance. When I started college, when I got married… but now that I had a child, she wanted to be part of the baby’s life, and Judson helped her.

He approached slowly and said, “I believed her, Reina. I didn’t want to at first. That’s why I hired a private investigator. I needed to know the truth. And she was telling the truth. Everything checked out. When I found out, I went to a lawyer. We’re working on it now.”

Judson also explained that he let my mom enter by disabling the security system in the house.

I was disappointed she and Judson lied to me, but they assured me they just waited for the right time to tell me the truth. And for whatever reason, I wasn’t mad at them any more.

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Bored Daddy

Love and Peace