Six months after my mother had come to settle in our home in Paris to keep my daughter… I noticed that her stomach was getting bigger by the day.vr
And that night, when I opened the baby monitor’s camera, I regretted doing it.
My name is Élise Moreau, I am twenty-nine years old, and I live with my husband, Thomas, and our little daughter, Clara, in an apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement, near Convention.
I work in a technology company in La Défense. Meetings, calls, files that pile up, messages that arrive even late at night… My life looked like a race without finish line.
When Clara was born, everything became even more complicated.
We had the means to take a nanny, but I couldn’t trust a stranger to keep my baby all day. So I asked my mother, Madeleine, who lived in Marseille, to come and help us for a while.
She accepted without hesitation.
As soon as he arrived, the apartment changed his soul.
There was again the smell of coffee in the morning, a hot soup in the evening, linen folded in the cupboards, and especially Clara surrounded by a love that no one else could have given him.
My mother always said:
I didn’t come to work, my daughter. I came to love my granddaughter.
I felt so grateful that I was trying to give him what I could.
I bought her clothes, comfortable shoes, pretty scarves. I also wanted to give him three hundred euros a month, at least for his personal expenses.
But she always refused.
“Keep your money for Clara, Élise. I need little.
For the first few months, everything seemed almost peaceful.
Then, around the fifth month, I started to notice something.
My mother ate less.
She said she wasn’t hungry.
However, his stomach was getting rounder and rounder.
At first, I thought it was age, digestion, lack of activity. She had passed her 50s, and since she was taking care of Clara, she had been coming out less than before.
One Sunday morning, while she was making an apple pie in the kitchen, I threw her smiling:
“Mom, you take your stomach, right?”
She laid a hand on her kidneys, smiled weakly and replied:
That’s age, darling. The body no longer does what you want.
I did not insist.
But in the sixth month, I couldn’t turn a blind eye.
His stomach had become really big, almost tense, while his arms, face and shoulders seemed to lose weight. Sometimes she had a grey complexion. She stopped in the middle of the hallway to catch her breath.
At night, I could hear him walking slowly in the apartment.
Once, I found her sitting in the living room, one hand on her stomach, the other on the back of the couch, her eyes closed as if she were holding a scream.
“Mom, we’re going to see a doctor.
She immediately shook her head.
