Cute Babies

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“Sell Off Your Apartment and Stop Whining — We’ll Build a House and Bring Mom to Live With Us,” My Husband Said About My Premarital Apartment
“Sell the apartment and stop making a scene,” Sergey said in a tone as if he were talking about some old bicycle. “We’ll use the money to build a house. For us. And we’ll move Mom in before it’s too late.”
I silently stirred sugar into my tea. The spoon softly clinked against the sides of the cup. For some reason, that tiny sound calmed me.
“Did you hear me?” my husband raised his voice. “Tomorrow we’re calling a real estate agent.”
“I heard you,” I nodded. “I heard you very carefully.”
Standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed over her chest was my mother-in-law, Tamara Petrovna. She looked pleased. As if the matter had already been settled.
My name is Anna. I’m thirty-six. Sergey and I have been married for four years.
And the apartment he so casually suggested I “sell off” was mine. Completely mine. A one-room apartment, but in a good neighborhood, in a new building. I bought it myself five years before I met Sergey — I saved up, took side jobs, denied myself everything. It was my fortress, my pride, my safety net.
When we got married, I rented that apartment out, and we lived in a larger rented two-bedroom place — it was more convenient that way. The money from renting out my one-room apartment naturally went into the shared household budget. For what? Exactly. Among other things, to support Tamara Petrovna, who was “poor thing, living on just one pension.”
The fact that Tamara Petrovna, besides her pension, had her own two-room apartment in a neighboring town, which she also rented out while carefully putting the money away “for a rainy day,” was somehow modestly left unmentioned.
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"“We’ll sell your apartment and buy a bigger one together. I’m not going to live in your place like some tenant!” the groom declared.
“We’ll sell your apartment and buy a shared one. I’m not going to live in your place like some tenant!” Matvey declared.
Anna could not believe her ears.
“But you said this was the perfect option for us,” she said quietly.
“I wasn’t thinking about the future!” Matvey got up from the table. “What will my friends say? That I’m living with a woman?”
Just yesterday, he had been admiring her new apartment, choosing tiles and curtains with her. He had been planning where they would put his favorite armchair. And today, all of a sudden, he was explaining why the home her mother had given her should become his too.
“This was my mother’s gift for my twenty-fifth birthday,” Anna clenched her fists under the table.
“Exactly! A gift to you, not to us!”
At that moment, Anna felt it: this was not about love at all.
Anna gathered the catalogs scattered across the table and carried them to the window. Beyond the glass, a March evening was growing dark, and the first lights were coming on in the courtyard of the new apartment building. Her apartment on the fourth floor overlooked a yard with a children’s playground — her mother had chosen that layout on purpose.
“Anya, you’re not listening to me,” Matvey came up behind her, but he did not hug her the way he used to. “I’m serious. We need to start out as equals.”
Anna was thirty years old, and for the past three years she had been saving for renovations to this apartment, setting money aside from her salary as an accountant at a small company. Back then, five years ago, her mother had come to her workplace with the documents.
“Sign here and here,” her mother said, spreading the papers right on top of Anna’s reports. “I finally sold that wreck outside the city. No one needed Grandma’s dacha. I added my own savings, and it was enough for a one-room apartment in a new district.”
“Mom, I can’t accept such a gift…”
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"The mother-in-law ripped the wig off my head at the anniversary party and screamed, “Scarecrow!” But two days later, everyone was laughing at her.
“Polina, why did you drag yourself here in that gray sack again?” Tamara Ilyinichna’s voice rang out louder than the clinking glasses. “People are celebrating a sixtieth birthday, and you’re sitting there as if you’re at a funeral.”
I tried to straighten my shoulders, but they felt as if they had been filled with lead. After six months of difficult treatment, every movement was hard.
“I’m comfortable in it, Tamara Ilyinichna,” I answered quietly, trying not to draw the guests’ attention.
“Comfortable, she says,” my mother-in-law snorted loudly and turned to the cousins who had come from Krasnodar. “Just look at her, good people. Nothing but skin and bones. It makes you sick to look at her. There’s no joy from her in the house, just one sour face. Her husband works like a slave, and instead of a blooming woman at home, there’s a walking shadow.”
A snicker passed around the table. Automatically, I adjusted the wide amber ring on my right finger. It kept slipping off now because my hands had grown so thin after three rounds of chemotherapy.
“Mom, that’s enough,” my husband Vadim said lazily, reaching for a slice of boiled pork. “Polina is just tired.”
“Tired, is she!” Tamara Ilyinichna pressed her brightly painted lips together. “And I’m not tired? This entire banquet was on me! Two weeks on my feet so we wouldn’t be ashamed in front of the relatives. I ordered three kinds of hot dishes alone. And your Polina was even too stingy to get a proper hairstyle. Her hair looks like tow. She put on some kind of cap made of artificial threads and thinks no one notices.”
“Tamara Ilyinichna, it’s a wig,” I said directly, looking her in the eyes. “You know perfectly well why I wear it.”
“Oh, here we go!” my mother-in-law threw up her hands, covered in gold rings. “Playing the martyr again. Enough already, parading your illnesses in public. People came here to celebrate, and you’re turning it into a funeral. Vadik needs a normal, healthy wife, not this bag of bones. Continued in the comment.”
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so cute❤😘

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“Your son left for a younger woman? Then go running to her for money!” Nadya cut off her former mother-in-law’s visit mid-sentence.
The evening had promised to be quiet. Outside the window, a fine October rain was drizzling, tapping against the metal sill. The apartment smelled of roast chicken and fresh bread. Nadya was sitting at the table beside her seven-year-old daughter, checking her math homework. Alisa was carefully writing numbers in her notebook, occasionally furrowing her brow in a funny way, exactly like her father. Nadya caught herself thinking that and immediately pushed the thought away. She did not want to remember.
The doorbell rang sharply and insistently. Not once, but in one long, demanding trill that, for some reason, immediately made Nadya’s stomach tighten. She looked through the peephole and froze.
Antonina Petrovna was standing on the threshold. Her former mother-in-law.
The woman was holding a large glossy shopping bag and an umbrella, which she had not even bothered to close in the stairwell, leaving wet streaks across the concrete floor.
Nadya hesitated for a second, then opened the door anyway. Out of sheer curiosity. What devil had brought this woman to her home six months after the divorce?
Antonina Petrovna swept into the hallway as if she owned the place. She smelled of expensive perfume with a bitter note and dampness. She quickly glanced around the corridor, let her gaze linger on the child’s little boots, pursed her lips, and said:
“Well, hello, Nadezhda. You weren’t expecting me, I suppose.”
“I wasn’t,” Nadya replied dryly, not moving from where she stood. “Did something happen?”
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“You are my wife, and you are obligated to support my masculine decisions.” My husband took out a loan behind my back, then demanded my salary.
“So, you are seriously suggesting that I transfer my entire salary to your card, and then write you a written justification in messenger for bus fare and coffee?”
I carefully placed my cup on the saucer and looked at my husband with a light, almost affectionate irony.
Denis sat across from me with the expression of a man who had just discovered the law of universal gravitation. In front of him lay a grimy notebook from the auto repair shop, filled with crooked columns of numbers. He had even bought a marker to highlight the “risk zones.”
“Anya, why are you exaggerating?” he frowned irritably, tapping his ballpoint pen on the table. “This is called asset consolidation. Times are difficult now, inflation is jumping, and the prices for car parts have gone through the roof. We need to build a financial safety cushion. I’m a man. I’m supposed to control the cash flow. And yesterday you bought an expensive face cream and ordered food delivery. I calculated it: that is a breach in the budget. Seven thousand in one week on women’s nonsense!”
I sighed, looking at his diligent scribbles. Twelve years of working as a senior accountant at the city bread factory had taught me two things: numbers never lie, and people who start using pretentious phrases about money are usually trying to hide their own glaring incompetence.
Denis worked as an auto mechanic. It was a respectable profession, and his hands were definitely in the right place — he could rebuild an engine with his eyes closed — but his relationship with mathematics had always been strained. Until recently, our budget had been semi-separate: we contributed equal shares for utilities and groceries, while each of us managed the rest on our own. We lived in my two-room apartment, which I had inherited from my grandmother five years before we went to the registry office.
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“Stop teaching me how to live. You are not my mother! I want you gone from here by tomorrow,” Olga declared.
“Could you tell me whether you might have a tablespoon?” Maxim was standing beside the disassembled stove, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other and looking at his empty hands.
The trouble had happened the previous evening: while Olga was making dinner, the burners had suddenly stopped responding when she turned them on. She had to look for a repairman, and now he had been working his magic over the kitchen appliance for half an hour.
Olga raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“A spoon?”
“Yes. I forgot my tools in the car, and I need some kind of lever here,” he nodded toward a stubborn screw that refused to give way. “I know it sounds strange.”
She could not hold back a light laugh—so sincere and easy that she had not laughed like that in a long time.
“And here I was imagining a respectable repairman with a whole set of tools.”
The lady of the house brought the largest spoon from the kitchen set and sat down on a stool nearby. Maxim worked slowly and carefully, explaining what he was doing along the way. His hands moved with confidence, inspiring trust.
“Do you live alone?” he asked, fastening the panel.
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“I’ll say it in front of everyone: I’m divorcing you!” her husband smirked at the family table. But a minute later, he turned pale.
Lena had never liked family gatherings at her mother-in-law’s house.
Not because the food was bad. On the contrary, the food was good: salads stood in huge bowls, meat came out on baking trays, pies were stacked in piles, as if the house were hosting not relatives, but a small military unit returning from a winter campaign.
And not because it was boring. It was never boring there. Someone was always lecturing someone else, comparing people, bringing up old grievances, asking when there would be children, why the renovation still hadn’t been done, why they had bought that jacket, and why a woman after forty had “let herself go so badly.”
Lena disliked those gatherings because at every table like that, she felt not like a person, but like an exhibit.
Here sits Andrey’s wife. Look, she smiles the wrong way. She eats too little. She eats too much. She stays silent, so she must be proud. She answers back, so she must be insolent.
Her mother-in-law, Valentina Petrovna, had a way of looking at people that made even the tea in their cup grow cold with guilt.
“Lenochka, do try the salad,” she would say in a sweet voice that made you want to apologize immediately for everything in the world. “I made it especially without mayonnaise. You’re not allowed fatty food, after all.”
“Why am I not allowed?” Lena once asked.
“Well, what do you mean, why…” her mother-in-law looked at her with gentle pity. “Your age, after all. You need to take care of yourself.”
Lena was thirty-eight at the time.
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"“I am the mistress of this house, and you can get out!” shouted my mother-in-law. I took off my apron, and an hour later the guests understood who I had given their money to.
The air in the spacious living room felt heavy from the abundance of aromas. On the snow-white starched tablecloth, decorated with intricate geometric folds, sparkling crystal salad bowls, expensive porcelain platters, and tiered serving stands crowded together with appetizers. In the very center of the enormous table stood a homemade farm duck, roasted with sprigs of fresh rosemary and slices of sweet orange. Its golden-brown crust, generously coated in a honey glaze, shone appetizingly under the bright light of the massive chandelier.
Beside it were elegant ceramic dishes filled with porcini mushroom julienne, sprinkled with a thick layer of melted parmesan, and dozens of miniature shortcrust tartlets with delicate cottage-cheese cream and large grains of red caviar. Fifteen invited relatives were enthusiastically working their silver forks, occasionally raising flattering toasts.
Zinaida Arkadyevna, celebrating her sixty-fifth birthday, sat at the head of the table with the posture of a member of the royal family at an official reception. She wore a luxurious emerald dress made of thick velvet that perfectly emphasized her status, and a heavy gold necklace encircled her neck. The woman accepted the endless congratulations with gracious nods, occasionally adjusting the flawless voluminous hairstyle over which a prestigious stylist at a beauty salon had worked for more than two hours.
Polina stood in the doorway of the living room, leaning her shoulder against the straight doorframe. In her hands she held a wide tray with clean dessert plates. The muscles in her back were tightening into a painful spasm from the long strain, and a fresh burn from a scorching metal baking tray throbbed on the index finger of her right hand.
Thirty-six hours of continuous, exhausting labor. That was exactly how much time she had spent turning her mother-in-law’s ordinary four-room apartment into a branch of an elite restaurant.
Polina had personally prepared long spreadsheets calculating the proportions for every dish. She had gone herself to the farmers’ market on the other side of the city, searching for the best poultry and the freshest vegetables. She had carried heavy bags of groceries up to the fifth floor with her own hands when the elevator in the building broke down. She had baked fifteen paper-thin cake layers for the dessert, standing by the hot stove until three in the morning while her husband, Ilya, slept peacefully in the next room.
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