The conversation with my father in December was moving in a way I hadn’t anticipated and hadn’t been braced for. I cried a little after we hung up, not from sadness exactly — from the specific emotion of having wanted to be seen clearly by a parent for a long time and then, unexpectedly, being seen.
I’m mentioning these things because the story of how a boundary gets established is not just the story of where the line ends up. It’s also the story of what it cost to draw it. And the cost was not unbearable — it was manageable, and the outcome was worth it, and I would do it again — but it was also real. The effort was real. The discomfort was real. The moments where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen were real.
People sometimes talk about setting limits as if it’s an act of clarity that happens in an instant. It isn’t, usually. It’s a process. You say the thing, and then you wait to see what happens, and then you respond to what happened, and then you wait again. The whole arc of this, from the Sunday dinner announcement to the conversation with my mother about the tape measure in January, was about four months. Four months of a situation finding its shape.
## What I Understood About Adam After All of This
I said earlier that I didn’t blame Adam specifically, and I want to say more about what that actually means, because it’s not the same as saying he wasn’t part of the problem.