When Adam needed a car, they bought him one. When I needed a car, I bought my own.
When Adam decided at twenty-eight to quit a job he hated and take six months to figure out what he wanted to do next, my parents covered his expenses. When I was twenty-six and was laid off and had three months of unemployment, I did not receive a similar offer. I didn’t ask for one, partly because it didn’t occur to me to ask and partly because I suspected the answer would have been complicated by the fact that they were already doing something similar for Adam.
None of these things happened because my parents loved Adam more. I don’t believe that. I think they loved us differently — they worried about him in a different way, saw him as requiring a different kind of support, and had at some point stopped asking whether I needed anything because I had never said that I did.
The problem with visible competence is that it reads as not needing help. What it actually means, in most cases, is that the help was never offered.
## Leah’s Observation About the Office
I told Leah about the family meeting over coffee that weekend, and she listened to the whole thing and then said, “The office thing is the one that’s going to keep coming up.”
“What do you mean?”
“You told them you need the office. They said okay. But if they move in — even temporarily, even in the guest room — the pressure to ‘use the space’ is going to be constant. Someone’s going to mention it. Your mom’s going to look at that room on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re in a meeting and think it’s just sitting there.”