I was on a call with a client team about a project deliverable that had been delayed. It was a call I had scheduled and sent to my calendar three days in advance. I was in the small room we use as my home office — a second bedroom we converted when I started working from home regularly. The door was closed. I had, before the call, said to Patricia: “I have a call from two to three-thirty. I’ll be in my office with the door closed.”
She said: “Of course.”
At two-forty, she knocked. Not softly. A definite knock.
I put myself on mute, opened the door, and said quietly that I was on a call.
She said she needed to know if I’d be eating dinner tonight because she was planning the grocery order.
I said: yes. I closed the door. I unmuted. I had been mid-sentence when she knocked and I had lost the thread and the client had moved on, and I spent the next ten minutes catching up on a call I’d spent three days preparing for.
After the call I sat in my office for five minutes.
The grocery question could have been texted to me. The grocery question could have waited forty-five minutes. The grocery question was not, in any objective analysis, urgent.
What it was, I would come to understand, was a test of whether my closed office door was a real boundary or a guideline. It was not a conscious test. I don’t believe Patricia calculated it. It was the behavior of someone who had spent forty years as the central figure in a household and found it genuinely difficult to understand that she was not the central figure in this one.