The Copying Game at Christmas

When Leona first became a mother, she thought the hardest part would be the sleepless nights.

It wasn’t.

The hardest part was handing her daughter to a sitter each morning, walking out the door in a pressed coat, and spending the day in a hospital that felt too bright, too loud, and too far from the tiny apartment where her two-year-old waited. Leona had spent more than a decade becoming a physician. She had deferred everything for that life: relationships, travel, sleep, even her own sense of identity. Leaving medicine would have meant surrendering the only thing she had ever been certain of. So she stayed.

Her husband, Mateo, understood in theory. He had a graduate degree, a decent salary, and a way of talking about sacrifice that made it sound noble instead of brutal. But Leona lived with the ache of it every day.

Her sister-in-law, Sera, lived differently.

Sera had not finished college. She had stumbled through a few messy years, then somehow righted herself enough to become a capable stay-at-home mother to a little girl named Junie, born just after Leona’s own daughter, Iris. Sera’s family helped constantly. Their mother, June, paid for things no one in Leona’s life would ever dream of asking for: groceries, clothes, vacations, toys, and once, infuriatingly, a four-hundred-dollar jogging stroller.

Leona had saved for months to buy that stroller while pregnant. It was the exact model she had researched obsessively, the one with the smooth wheels and the adjustable handle and the perfect suspension for the city sidewalks. Her own splurge, earned through discipline and patience.

Then June had bought the same one for Junie.

“She doesn’t even run,” Leona had said to Mateo, staring at the stroller’s gleaming frame on the family group chat. He had only shrugged.

“It’s the same for both girls. Isn’t that nice?”

That was the first moment Leona felt something sharp and ugly in herself.

After that, she noticed the pattern everywhere.

The same shoes. The same books. The same winter coat. The same toy kitchen. The same car seat, the same toddler plates, the same rain boots, the same picture books with the tabs chewed by Iris’s teeth. Whenever Leona bought something special for her daughter, June seemed to know within hours and order the matching version for Junie. Sometimes Sera asked directly, casually, as if they were sharing a catalog rather than a life.

Then June bought plane tickets for Sera’s family to join Leona and Mateo on a vacation they were paying for themselves.

Leona told herself, again and again, that it was June’s money. June and her husband had earned it. They could spend it how they liked.

But the older woman did not spend like someone who had planned for the future. Mateo, who had handled their estate paperwork, had quietly admitted his parents were living far beyond their means. They were making good money, yes, but they were also spending nearly every dollar that came in. Leona could already see the shape of the problem: no retirement cushion, no discipline, and somehow, eventually, the expectation that their son would help.

Then came the pregnancy.

Leona and Sera found themselves expecting at nearly the same time, and Leona had let herself hope—just a little—that maybe this next round of motherhood would feel less lonely, less asymmetrical. Then she miscarried near the end of her second trimester.

The loss hollowed her out.

After that, the copying stopped being merely annoying. It became intolerable.

Every cheerful duplication felt like a mockery of the effort it took Leona to build the life she had. She worked. She missed bedtime. She carried guilt in one hand and a stethoscope in the other. And meanwhile Junie received the same experiences, the same gifts, the same delight, with no sacrifice attached.

It seemed unfair in a way that made Leona ashamed of herself.

Christmas arrived in a blur of wrapping paper and cinnamon and too-loud relatives.

Leona did what she could to keep her resentment private. She bought Junie a few duplicates of small gifts Iris would receive—books, a toy set, a set of wooden blocks. But Iris’s main present was a pretend doctor kit, with a white coat and a toy stethoscope and a little plastic clipboard. Iris adored it instantly. She looped the coat around her shoulders and announced, with solemn authority, that she would be “Dr. Iris” like Mama.

Leona nearly cried.

June noticed the toy at once and, before the afternoon was over, had ordered the same kit online for Junie.

Later, Leona watched Sera pull the same slim picture books from a shopping bag and realized they were the very books Iris had been reading all week. June had seen them on the sofa during a recent visit and must have copied the title list without even trying to hide it.

At one point, Sera brought up toddler beds, asking Leona which one she had been considering for Iris.

Leona answered carefully, naming a simple white bed with rounded corners.

By evening, June had apparently convinced Sera to choose the same one for Junie.

The absurdity of it finally landed in a way that softened Leona’s anger.

It was ridiculous. It was petty. It was also deeply, almost comically transparent.

What infuriated her most was not the copying itself, but the strange family doctrine behind it: whatever Iris had, Junie must have too, as if childhood were a contest June had appointed herself to judge.

Leona decided, over the course of the holiday, that she would stop adjusting her life to accommodate it.

She would buy Iris what she wanted to buy Iris. If June wanted to duplicate it, that was June’s business.

As for Mateo, the two of them had another conversation, this one more serious than the others. Leona learned just how shaky his parents’ finances really were. June and her husband were earning a high income, but spending almost ten thousand dollars a month, and somehow still living as if tomorrow would always arrive with more money.

Mateo admitted he was worried.

His instinct was to help them build the business higher, increase the income, keep the machine running.

Leona disagreed. She thought they needed boundaries, a budget, and the uncomfortable truth.

They did not solve that argument over Christmas. It remained open, unresolved, one more thing waiting in the long corridor of married life.

But Leona came away with one small victory.

She no longer intended to compete.

Let June buy the same coat, the same toy, the same bed. Let Sera mirror every choice she made. Let the family call it fairness if it made them feel better.

Leona would keep choosing for her daughter the way she always had: with care, with intention, and without asking permission from anyone else’s strange little kingdom of comparison.