I thought about what the alternative would have looked like — the version where none of this had been said, where my parents had moved in without a timeline, where my office had been absorbed into the arrangement incrementally because nobody had defined what was off-limits. I’d have answered the call. I’d have lost the thread of whatever I was doing. I’d have felt the familiar low-grade resentment of someone whose space is being eroded in increments too small to object to individually.
Instead, my mother said she’d try mornings. That was the whole thing.
## The Conversation With My Father
My father is not a man who has a lot of individual conversations with me that are separate from the context of family gatherings. We talk at dinners and holidays and the occasional phone call, and in those contexts he participates in the conversation as it exists rather than having conversations of his own. He is not secretive about this; he simply processes things internally and doesn’t tend to seek out the one-on-one exchanges that I sometimes feel like I need.
So it surprised me when he called me on a Tuesday night in December, without a specific occasion, and asked if I had a few minutes.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘about what you said at the family meeting. About being assumed into things instead of asked.’
I waited.
‘I do that,’ he said. ‘I’ve always done that. With your mother, with you kids. I decide something, or I agree that something is a good idea, and then I figure the right thing to do is tell people, because you tell people things. But telling people isn’t the same as asking them.’