No Contact Is Not the End of the Work

Most of us keep a sentence ready for the break room. A coworker asks about Thanksgiving plans and we say it without thinking, we're not really close, and then she tells us about the drive to her sister's and the traffic getting there, and that's that. A sentence like that takes about two years to build. We built them after trying the honest answer once, usually at a party, to somebody who went still and started looking around the room, and after that nobody tries it again.

There's a short one for coworkers, a longer one for people we like but haven't made up our minds about, and the whole story goes to maybe three people, and we know which one we're using before we answer. A friend of mine has been running hers for eleven years without slipping once, which is a lot of work to put into a question about your own mother.

The sorting never stops, because every new friendship comes with the same question of when to say something and how much. You can't take it back once you've said it, and then you spend a year or two watching her for signs she's decided you're the difficult one. Some people never get told at all. They think we have parents somewhere who we see at Christmas, and the story has to stay straight, which means remembering what you said in 2022 about why they weren't at the wedding.

A lot of us also say nothing to spare other people, which surprises them when they hear it. We don't bring it up in November when everyone at work is talking about flights home, and we say nothing at the baby shower where somebody's mother is running the whole event and doing a beautiful job, we sit there and let it be a nice afternoon for the people whose afternoon it is, and we feel it later, in the car. We decided a long time ago that this is a downer and nobody should have to hear it, and we've stuck to that, and it gets lonely, and from outside it looks like we're doing fine.

Telling someone usually means handling her reaction instead of getting any help with your own. She asks if you've tried reaching out, she says people change, she says your mother's getting older and you'll be sorry, she says but she's your mother in a tone that ends it. So now you're explaining, you're pulling out examples, and none of it works, because what she's saying is that families stay together and yours didn't and she wants that fixed so things make sense again. Most women give up after a few rounds and go back to it's complicated.

People don't see the stories or the sorting, and they don't see a woman on a Tuesday working out whether she can stand two hours at a party where everyone will be comparing notes about their mothers, then deciding no and making up somewhere she has to be. What they see is somebody who isn't there, and they call it cold, or stubborn, or too proud to pick up a phone.

The work before this was easier to see, because it was time and money. One woman's mother has been on her phone plan since 2016 and neither of them has ever said a word about it. Another cosigned a car in 2022, her mother quit making the payments eight months later, and she's been paying the note ever since on a car she's never driven, while her mother tells relatives that her daughter never does a thing for her. A third pays for a storage unit full of furniture that isn't hers, she's paid it every month since the move, she could cancel it any time she wants, and she hasn't, and she can't really say why.

So when a relative tells you that you took the easy way out, look at what she can actually see, which is a woman who stopped coming to things and stopped answering calls, and none of the rest of it, because the rest of it happens at work, or in the car on the way home, or in the second before you answer a question about your holidays. We did not stop working on our families, we stopped doing the part that showed, which was sitting at her table on a Sunday where everybody could see that we came.