Martin, when I told him about the budget conversation in our next session, asked how it had felt.
I said: like a normal conversation between two adults who share a life.
He said: was that unusual?
I thought about it. I said: more unusual than it should have been.
He said: and now?
I said: we’re getting better at it.
A Final Note on Patricia
I do not want to end this account in a way that turns Patricia into a cautionary illustration. She is a sixty-five-year-old woman who sold a house and needed a landing place and stayed longer than she should have, in a way that overstepped and caused real problems, and who is now in her own apartment eight miles away, going to a library book club that she mentioned again when she visited in January as a thing she was finding genuinely enjoyable.
The book club, specifically, is something I think about. Not as redemption exactly but as: this is what was missing. A place that was hers. People who knew her as a person and not as an extension of her son’s household. Something to be useful at that did not require overstepping into someone else’s kitchen.
The anxiety that drove the overstepping — the anxiety about losing family centrality, about being alone in a way she had not been since before she was married — is real and it is hers to manage and it is not my responsibility to cure. But I can understand it without it being a reason to accept an arrangement that was not working.