PART 2 My parents told my kids “NO MONEY FOR TICKETS”, while giving them out to neighbors…

Saturday afternoon at my parents’ place outside Chicago. Smoke from the grill, paper plates, yelling kids, the whole suburban postcard. My parents had gathered all the grandkids at their lake house.

Grandma and Grandpa stood there like benevolent Santa Clauses, handing out tickets to Dreamland Park. You know, that giant amusement park every kid in the Midwest begs to visit at least once. It was one of those sickly sweet scenes.

Each kid got a shiny ticket. Jumping, squealing. “Thank you, Grandma.”

The works. Then they got to my two, and my father, with a straight face, said, “Oh, Anna, I’m sorry. We ran out of money.”

I watched him say it while still holding a little fan of tickets. My kids, eight-year-old Lizzie and six-year-old Mikey, just froze. Their mouths were already stretching into smiles that never got a chance to show up.

I blinked. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Then I’ll buy tickets myself.”

My sister Olivia actually laughed out loud. “You’re the only outsider here,” she smirked. “My kids and yours don’t really go together.”

Right after that, they started handing the extra tickets to the neighbors’ kids. Right there. In front of mine.

So, yeah. I grabbed my two sobbing kids, buckled them into their booster seats, and drove away. And later, I did something my family is still choking on.

My name is Anna. If you’d told me four years ago that my own family would treat my kids like they carried something shameful, I’d have told you to lay off the drama. And yet there I was, on my parents’ lawn outside Chicago, watching my daughter and son stand there as the only grandkids without tickets.

Standard, painfully boring backstory. Two and a half years before that, I divorced my husband, Eric. He’d been having an affair with his office manager for two years.

At home, he’d humiliate me in front of the kids like it was a hobby, but in my parents’ eyes, I was the one who destroyed such a beautiful family. At first, it showed up as little things. New Year’s, my nephews got new iPhones.

My kids got plain envelopes with a five-dollar bill in each. Literally five. I pretended not to notice.

“Kids are small,” I told myself. “They don’t count money yet.” Then it got worse.

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