I said some version of this to my father in December, though not in those words — more in the words of: I handle things, but handling things has a cost, and the cost is mine to manage but it’s real. He heard it. The December call was the evidence that he’d heard it.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d said something like this earlier — years earlier, at one of the moments when the pattern was establishing itself rather than after it had been established for decades. I don’t know. Maybe it would have changed something. Maybe the pattern was established early enough that saying something about it would have just produced reassurance that everything was fine and nothing would change. Probably some of both.
What I know is that when I said it at thirty-six, during an actual crisis that required actual resolution, it landed. People hear things differently when there’s something specific at stake. The capable-people-don’t-need-things assumption had been harmless, or at least invisible, when there was nothing pressing against it. It became visible when it ran up against my office and my professional life and my clearly articulated unwillingness to absorb what it would have cost me.
Making things visible requires friction, sometimes. I’d rather have done without the friction. But the visibility it produced has been worth it.
## A Note on What Was Owed and What Wasn’t
At some point during the acute phase of all this, a well-meaning person said to me: you know they’re your parents, right? As if I might have forgotten. As if the category ‘parents’ carried automatic specifications for how much I was expected to give.