On the Wednesday of that week, I called my own mother.
My mother lives four states away and we talk every two or three weeks in the normal rhythm of adult children and parents who are close but not in each other’s daily lives. She had heard pieces of the Patricia situation over the months, the same pieces I had given to Lena, the same careful fraction of the full picture.
I gave her more of the full picture on the Wednesday call.
She listened. My mother is someone who has opinions and states them, a quality I appreciate in the abstract and find, when I am the subject of the opinion, slightly challenging. But what she said this time was not an opinion. What she said was a question.
She said: do you feel like Daniel is your partner in this or like you’re managing it alone?
I said: mostly alone.
She said: okay.
Just that: okay. Not an indictment of Daniel, not a declaration of whose side she was on, just an acknowledgment of a fact I had said out loud that I had not previously said out loud to anyone, not even Lena.
Mostly alone is a hard thing to say about a marriage. It is the kind of sentence that, once said, cannot be unsaid, and that changes the shape of what needs to happen next.
I thought about it for two more days. I thought about whether it was accurate and I kept arriving at the same place: yes. I was managing the situation mostly alone, in the specific sense that I was the one noticing, adjusting, absorbing, occasionally raising, and then accepting the insufficient response. Daniel was not doing this alongside me. He was doing something adjacent to it, something that looked similar from a distance but was different in substance: he was hoping things would resolve.