I said yes to that one too. But after I hung up, I sat in my kitchen while Ella colored at the table and Max watched YouTube with headphones on, and I had an honest conversation with myself about what was happening.
I was not “holding on.” I had become the default parent. I was doing drop-offs and pickups, grocery shopping for two additional people with food preferences I had to learn, helping Max with a history project, taking Ella to her six-year checkup because Owen gave me the pediatrician’s information and said he couldn’t get away from work and Brooke was two hours out. I was doing this while maintaining a full-time remote job and living in a two-bedroom townhouse that was designed for one adult and a cat.
I had not signed up for this.
But here was the other thing I knew: I loved Max and Ella. They weren’t abstractions in this calculation; they were actual children who were going through an actual disruption and who had landed in my apartment and made it theirs in small ways — Max’s library books stacked on the end table, Ella’s drawings held to my refrigerator with magnets — and I didn’t want them to feel like burdens, because they weren’t. They were my niece and nephew.
I wanted the situation to be different, not the children.
So I called my friend Priya, who has a clear head about family dynamics and who had been watching me absorb all of this over the preceding weeks without saying much. “You need to have a real conversation with Owen,” she said. “Not a can-you-hold-on conversation. A what-is-the-plan conversation.”