Now: the same job, the larger apartment, the savings that took a temporary hit from the legal consultation and a few other dispute-related expenses but are being rebuilt, still talking to Tessa, talking to Luke more, talking to my mother less but more honestly.
The differences in the list are small. The differences in me are harder to quantify but feel real. I know something now about my own capacity for sustained, quiet, unglamorous maintenance of a correct position that I did not know before. I found out that I could hear ‘you will destroy this family’ and keep going. I found out that I could have months of uncertain waiting and continue to function. I found out that I could be sad about my mother and still refuse to absorb her consequences simultaneously.
These are not dramatic discoveries. They are the kind of things you learn about yourself in the doing of hard, undramatic things. I am glad to know them, even if the learning was expensive.
I am also, in the way that is quieter and more complicated to name, a person who has a different relationship to the word ‘family’ than I did a year ago. Not a worse relationship to it — I don’t think so — but a more careful one. A more examined one. A relationship that includes a clearer understanding that the demands family makes on you are not automatically legitimate just because they come from family. That love is real and coercion is real and they can exist in the same relationship, held by the same person, used by the same person. That understanding which one is happening at any given moment is work, and the work is worth doing.