UnEasy Like Sunday Mornings by Naja Hall
There was something about Sundays that never felt like rest, no matter how quiet the house was when I first opened my eyes. I would wake up already tense, already bracing myself, because Sundays were the days I knew something was coming, even before anything had actually happened.
It always started the same way. A barrage of texts that didn’t ask questions so much as they set a tone, and before we could even find our footing, the phone would ring. It would be the oldest, her voice shaking, crying in a way that no child should have to cry, and you could feel that something wasn’t right even before she got a full sentence out. The panic didn’t match the moment. The intensity didn’t belong to her.
And then you realize what you’re actually listening to.
You’re not just hearing a child. You’re hearing a grown woman’s pain, her anger, her accusations, all of it funneled through the voice of an eight-year-old who doesn’t have the emotional capacity to carry it, let alone understand it. You could almost see it happening on the other end of the phone, her mother close by, feeding it, shaping it, guiding it, like a puppeteer with her hand pressed firmly into her back.
I would sit there and watch my husband try to calm her down, his voice steady in a way that felt almost impossible given what he was being handed, and it never seemed to matter how gentle he was or how carefully he chose his words. The more he tried to reassure her, the more upset she became, and right behind that, almost on cue, you would hear it.
“See how your dad is upsetting you? If he loved you, he’d be here with you!”
READ THE UNSHAKEABLE STEPMOM EBOOK
There is something deeply unsettling about hearing a child repeat something like that, because you know those words are not theirs, even if the emotion starts to feel real to them in the moment. It was cruel in a way that didn’t leave bruises you could point to, but it left something behind all the same.
For years, I loathed her.
I could not make sense of how someone could do that to their own child, how you could take a moment that should feel safe and turn it into something so heavy, so confusing, and so misaligned with what was actually happening. It didn’t feel like conflict between adults. It felt like something else entirely.
And I remember asking myself, over and over again, why Sundays??
Why this day? Why the one day that is supposed to slow down, that is supposed to feel like a reset, that is supposed to give everyone a chance to breathe before the week starts again?
But after a while, you stop asking why and you start recognizing patterns for what they are.
Sundays weren’t random.
They were TOO quiet. Quiet enough to be interrupted. Open enough to be filled. Predictable enough to become routine.
And over time, something shifted.
Not all at once, and not in a way that felt like resolution, but the calls started coming less frequently. The intensity softened, or maybe it just moved somewhere else, somewhere we couldn’t hear it anymore. Eventually, the Sundays stopped sounding like that altogether.
Now, it shows up differently.
An occasional group text, usually once a year, sometimes less, where she loops the kids in, who are now old enough to have their own phones, their own access, their own space to respond or just placate their mothers bemoans. There’s a distance now that wasn’t there before, but it’s not freedom. This quiet Sunday is just the quiet fallout.
Because the damage doesn’t disappear just because the behavior changes. It settles. It lingers. It reshapes how everyone moves around each other.
Everyone has learned where it is safest to stand. And for those kids…and their father, that means standing apart.
Them over there. Us over here. Never quite meeting in the middle in a way that feels natural or unforced.
It is not loud anymore, but it is not whole either.
And still, there is a part of me that notices the quiet on Sundays now, the absence of that tension that used to sit so heavily in the room, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t grateful for it.
Not because everything is fixed, but because sometimes peace won’t come in the form of resolution. It comes in the form of distance.
And for now, the quiet of Sundays feels like something we had to survive to receive finally.
xx Naja
