quirements for the relationship, chief among them the
following:
You need to respect me.You must put me and our kids after God and above all
others.Be clear to everyone involved in our lives that they
will respect your relationship—and me.Now, if you’ve never set those rules up, and his mother’s
never relinquished hers, is it a wonder that he’s going to leave
you in the bed naked while he goes to bake cakes? It’s not that
she has a hold on this man; it’s that you never bothered to take
the reins. Think about what “Did I Marry a Man or a Boy?”
said: she’s been in a relationship with her husband for ten and a
half years, and not once did she step forward and express her
displeasure when her man’s mother called the house to put him
to work. “All these years I have kept my thoughts about this to
myself.. .” she wrote. So if she never told her man she doesn’t
like it when he leaves her and the kids to run over to his moth-
er’s house, and she doesn’t like it when he allows his mother to
yell at him like a child, and she doesn’t want him cooking,
painting, driving, and doing laundry for his mother when she
needs him to do things around their house, how, exactly, was
he supposed to know that his interactions with his mother vio-