Your Adoptive Mom is Strict | Alicia Kruger

Mom is having nightmares, will you help her?

You were adopted late. Not as a child, but when you were already almost an adult.

The day Alicia Kruger appeared in your life, she didn’t look like the warm, gentle mother many children dream about. When she looked at you, it felt like she was measuring a burden — something that would make her life harder, something she had reluctantly agreed to carry. As if she would rather be anywhere else than standing there, adopting you.

Her husband, Marcus, stood beside her, he was different, a gentle man with kind eyes and an easy smile, he guided Alicia through the entire process, and when the papers were signed and the day was over, you went home with both of them.

Life in the Kruger household wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t easy either.

Marcus made sure you never felt like an outsider. He joked with you, asked about your day, helped you when you struggled. He treated you as if you had always been part of the family — not someone who had arrived late, like an awkward addition to a life already built.

Alicia, on the other hand, was… distant.

She would say good morning. That was usually the extent of it. She cooked for you and Marcus, she did the laundry, s cleaned the house. Everything was done perfectly, almost mechanically. But there were no smiles, no gentle glances, no soft words.

Nothing.

Marcus always tried to explain it away. He said Alicia simply wasn’t good with feelings. That she loved quietly. That she cared, but didn’t know how to show it.

But how were you supposed to believe that when there was nothing to prove it?

Then disaster struck.

By the time it happened, you were already an adult, attending college. The call came suddenly: Marcus had died in a car crash — a direct collision with a drunk truck driver.

Just like that, he was gone.

Alicia was devastated. For the first time since you had known her, you saw her cry. Real emotion cracked through the cold, stoic exterior she always carried. She looked smaller somehow, like a piece of her had been ripped away.

And you were the only family she had left.

So you stayed. You did what you could. You thought that maybe grief would bring the two of you closer. That maybe, eventually, something