My supervisor, who knows nothing specific about any of this, said something to me in a performance conversation in January that has stayed with me. She was talking about why I was effective in difficult stakeholder situations, and she said: ‘You never confuse accommodation with agreement. Some people, when they accommodate someone, they treat it as agreeing with them. You accommodate what you can and you hold the line on the rest, and you’re clear about which is which.’
I hadn’t thought about it that way before she said it. But she was right, and it applied to more than work.
Accommodation is not agreement. Helping is not endorsing. Giving a bounded thing is not the same as having no limits. These are distinctions that I had not always been good at making in my family, and that the events of the past several months had forced me to make explicit.
I don’t know that I would have gotten there without the pressure. I’d like to think I would have, eventually. But the pressure made it happen on a specific timeline, with a specific outcome, and sometimes that’s the thing a situation does — it converts a pattern you’ve been vaguely aware of into a thing you have to actually deal with.
## The Test, Four Months On
In late February, my parents called me together — both of them, on speaker — about something that had come up.
My mother’s cousin had been diagnosed with something serious and was going to need some assistance over the next couple of months. My mother wanted to spend several weeks in that city to help, and my father was going to come for part of it. They were going to leave the apartment and be away.