‘It was a lot,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to say I see that. And I’m glad it worked out.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘Okay back to work,’ he said. ‘Sorry for interrupting.’
‘You didn’t interrupt anything,’ I said. Which was not quite true but was the kind of not-quite-true that felt right.
I put my phone down and went back to the documentation. But the exchange sat with me for the rest of the afternoon in the specific way that small things sit with you when they represent something larger than themselves.
He’d asked. Out of nowhere, with no immediate purpose, he’d sent a text to ask if I was okay like actually. I don’t know exactly what had prompted it — whether it was something Maya had said, or something he’d thought about on his own, or just the accumulation of the past several months finally settling into a moment when he felt like checking in. But he’d done it.
That mattered to me. It still does.
## What My Work Supervisor Said
I should mention that none of this happened in a vacuum outside of work. I am a project coordinator. My job involves, among other things, managing relationships between people who have conflicting priorities and need to arrive at workable solutions without destroying the relationship in the process. I am reasonably good at this. My manager has told me I am reasonably good at this.
What I find slightly wry, in retrospect, is that I brought to my family situation the exact same skills I use at work: state the actual constraint, identify alternatives that exist, propose a specific and limited offer rather than an unlimited one, get commitment to something concrete rather than a vague plan. These are project coordination skills. I applied them to my family and they worked.