Paige was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “Yes. I understand.”
“I need you to really understand it. Not apologize. Understand.”
“I understand that those occasions happened and you weren’t there and that is because of what I did,” she said. “I don’t know what I can do about that except to make sure it doesn’t continue.”
“That’s what I need from you,” I said. “I’m not asking you to undo it. I’m asking you to not minimize it. When I say I missed things, I need you to say yes, you did, and not move past it quickly.”
“Yes,” she said. “You did.”
We sat with that for a moment.
“I’m going to have bad periods,” I said. “Where I’m not graceful about this. I don’t want to promise that I’ll always be calm.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not asking you to be.”
It was not a comfortable conversation. It was honest, which is different from comfortable, and in its honesty it was useful. I felt somewhat better after having had it. Not resolved — resolution was going to take much longer than three weeks — but better in the way that expressing a true thing is better than holding it.
I tell this part because I think accounts of family rupture often skip the ungraceful middle. The dinners and the confrontations make for story. The Tuesday evenings in early October when you are just sitting with the weight of it, that’s the actual work, and it does not always look like wisdom.