Hello Reddit, this is my first post so sorry if this is too rambling. This was some years ago, my wife and I moved to a new state and a little under 2 months after moving she ended up needing to go to the ER and ended up needing to stay in the hospital for over a week, this would be a hard time for any spouse to go through.

Now a little back story on me before we get to the main problem. I spent a lot of time in and out of doctors offices/hospitals due to scoliosis treatments and learning differences. My parents (mother) in particular helped me through all the surgeries and hospital visits. All the medical issues I had created a lot of trauma for me that at the time of this story I had not successfully worked through yet, I have now been in therapy for the last 3 years and am working through this and additional trauma. Additionally as a graduation present my mother purchased a new to me car, the vehicle and loan were in her name while it was being paid off. My wife and I drove the vehicle and had not transferred the registration to our name as of yet (this will all be relevant). Living in a major city toll roads were unavoidable and we hadn't gotten our own toll tag yet so in the meantime we were going to the online portal and paying as we went.

Now back to the story, wife is in the hospital. So I'm not handling this very well due to my unresolved trauma. My dad was in the same city as us and came to the hospital to support me and visit my wife which I really appreciated. My mother who was in another state had not reached out to me for a few days while this was all going on, she eventually did and reached out by text saying something along the lines of "Hey OP sorry to hear about x hope she's ok." Along with the text she included a photo of a bill from the toll road totaling $3.49 and said "I went ahead and paid the balance you owe the toll company please pay me back as soon as you can." At the time I was so in shock about the situation with my wife that I didn't really process what was happening so I said sure and said I'd send her payment soon and she responded with "A check will be fine." After this I go back to worrying about my wife and put in the back of my head, a few days later she is released from the hospital and given the all clear to go home. Once she has taken some time to recover and things start getting back to normal for us I let my wife know about what my mom said and show her the text exchange and my wife is livid she knows how much medical stuff I went through as a kid and how difficult this was for me as well as her and she knows that my mom is well aware of all this. When she sees the total that we owe my mom we decide that instead of sending the check we were going to send her a card with coins in it (this was around Thanksgiving/Christmas time) originally we wanted to send her all pennies however the postage was too expensive so we opted for quarters, dimes, and nickels. We sent her the card with an enactiption along the lines of "here is what we owe you, Merry Christmas." Never heard from her once she received it but I was told later at a family Christmas even that she called my dad about it and asked him to "talk to me " about this and didn't understand why I would do something like this to her.

TLDR: My mom sent me a toll booth invoice for less than $4 while my wife was in the hospital. Thank you for reading!

Just for clarification as there seems to be some debate in the comments I had discussed transferring the car and loan to my name fully prior to moving as some other incidents had occurred that made me want to go NC but she refused. Once the loan was paid in full I was able to get it titled in my name.