My husband sat on the bathroom floor with me while I cried about money

Dear Delyara, I was embarrassed before I even started crying. We weren’t facing catastrophe, but we were under pressure, and I had been holding all the little calculations in my head until they turned into panic. I locked myself in the bathroom because it felt ridiculous to cry over numbers, over grocery totals, over school trip forms, over the rising cost of things I used to buy without mentally flinching. He knocked softly, came in when I said yes, and sat on the floor beside the bath. He didn’t tell me to calm down. He didn’t immediately start solving things while I was still sobbing. He just stayed there long enough for me to stop feeling ashamed of being overwhelmed. Later we did look at the numbers together. But first he helped me feel like a person again. That order mattered.