And some things are better addressed by changing the pattern than by dissecting the history of it. We’re changing the pattern. That might be enough.
## What Leah Got Right From the Beginning
I want to give Leah credit for something specific, because she earned it.
From the very first phone call — the morning I called her before work, standing in my kitchen looking at the room my parents apparently planned to occupy — she never told me what to feel. She asked what I wanted to happen, she helped me clarify what I was actually willing to offer, and she named the things I was trying not to name because naming them felt like the kind of behavior I’d been trained to identify as being difficult.
‘Your work schedule matters,’ she said, on that first call. Not ‘I understand this is frustrating but family comes first’ or ‘they’re your parents and they need you’ or any of the other sentences that would have been technically supportive while practically redirecting me away from what I needed to say.
The thing about being in a family dynamic where you’re consistently the one who accommodates is that you develop a trained reflex against your own needs. The reflex says: your feelings about this are understandable but they’re also the problem. The reflex says: being the one who says no is being the difficult one. The reflex says: if you were really as capable as everyone thinks you are, you’d find a way to make this work without anyone having to feel bad about it.