Helpful Gestures and What They Became
The first two weeks were genuinely fine. I want to say this clearly because I have told pieces of this story to Lena and to my own mother and there is a version of the telling where Patricia arrived as a villain and immediately began her campaign, and that is not what happened.
What happened was that Patricia arrived with two large suitcases and a gratitude that seemed sincere, and she was helpful in the way of someone who genuinely wants to contribute and doesn’t know yet that contribution and control are different things.
She cooked three nights in the first week, which was welcome because Daniel and I both work full schedules and Tuesday and Thursday nights are often the nights where we look at each other at seven o’clock and nobody wants to decide. She did the laundry one day when I was in a project meeting that ran long. She organized the pantry, which needed it.
She asked before she did the pantry. She said, “Do you mind if I take a look at the pantry? I have some ideas.” I said sure, because the pantry did need attention and I didn’t have the time that week. The pantry afterward was genuinely better organized. I noted this.
What I didn’t note carefully enough was that the pantry reorganization was followed, two weeks later, by the spice cabinet reorganization, which was not preceded by asking. The sequence — ask once, establish that reorganizing is acceptable, and then reorganize without asking — is a pattern I recognized only in retrospect.