@coolio with all due respect that response is exactly the problem.

She worked a night shift. She got home in the early hours of the morning. She had maybe 5 hours of sleep. And your advice is that she should have come down for 20 minutes to perform for her mother in law?

And then you say “most women in that situation would have.” Most women in that situation would have what? Pushed through exhaustion to make a man and his mother comfortable?

Her husband knew her schedule. He knew what that week looked like. He made a choice to let his family come anyway because he could not tell his mother no. That is his failure not hers. And now she is the one apologizing for it.

Ngozi you are not wrong. Your husband put you in an impossible position and is now blaming you for not climbing out of it gracefully enough.