The question they were calling with was not ‘can you take care of something for us while we’re gone.’ The question was: ‘Is there anything we should know about or that you’d want us to handle before we leave.’
They were asking. Before deciding. Providing information and asking if there was anything I needed from them.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think you have what you need. I hope your cousin is okay.’
‘We’ll check in,’ my mother said.
‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘But I’m here if you need anything.’
After we hung up, I sat in my kitchen and registered what had just happened. Not the news about the cousin, which was sad in the particular way that health news in extended family is sad. The call itself. The shape of it. They had called to tell me something that was happening, and to ask if there was anything I needed, and to not assume that the thing they were doing would automatically create obligations for me.
That was the shape of the call I had been asking for, implicitly, for the entire arc of this situation. Not information after the fact. Not assumption. Consultation.
Four months.
Patterns change slowly. This one was changing.
## The Particular Difficulty of Being Competent
I’ve thought about what my mother said — ‘you’ve always been so capable, you’ve always just handled things’ — more than I’ve thought about almost anything else from this situation. Because it’s true, and because the truth of it is complicated.