“Because You Taught Me to Be.” My Mother-in-Law Mocked My Six-Year-Old for Wearing His Sister’s Dress. She Didn’t Know I Could Hear Her. 

This is an original short story. Names, characters, and events are fictional.
My mother-in-law said it in my kitchen on a Sunday, about our six-year-old, who was eight feet away with the door open.

Theo was on the living room floor in his sister’s yellow sundress. The one with the pockets. He’d worn it most days since June, over pajamas once, even to the pediatrician. Maya doesn’t care. She’s eight, she outgrew it, and she says yellow was never her color anyway.