Not a broken family. A performing family, which is a different thing. We performed at Christmas and at Thanksgiving and at my parents’ anniversary parties, and we performed well, and my parents seemed genuinely nourished by the performances, and the question I had been sitting with for several years was whether the performances were a kindness to them or a disservice.
The question arrived with particular force the Christmas my mother cried in the pantry twice.
I drove home from Connecticut that year and called my therapist on the second day of January and described what I had witnessed, and she asked me what I had felt watching my mother cry.
I said I had felt helpless.
She asked why.
Because there’s nothing I can do about it, I said. The crying is about a family dynamic that has been in place for twenty years and no one is willing to address directly.
She said: what would you need to do to feel less helpless?
I said: actually address it.
She said: what’s stopping you?
I sat with this for a while.
Fear, I said eventually. Fear that naming it will make it worse. That it’s easier for everyone if things stay as they are.
She said: easier for whom?
I drove back to Connecticut three weeks later.
Not for a family event. On a Wednesday, in January, alone, just to sit with my parents at their kitchen table and have a real conversation with them.
My mother was surprised. My father was pleased in the simple way he was always pleased when one of his children appeared at the door, which was one of the things I loved about him most.
We had lunch.
Afterward, when my mother was about to suggest we move to the living room for coffee, I said: “Can we stay here for a minute? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
They looked at each other with the communication of a couple who have been together long enough that entire sentences pass between them in a glance.
“Of course,” my mother said.
I had thought carefully about how to begin this. Not about what to say in full, because I knew from experience that scripted difficult conversations tend to go sideways when the other person does not follow the script. But about where to enter.
I entered at the truth, which was the only entrance that felt honest.
“I’ve been worried about you,” I said to my mother. “Specifically about Christmas. I’ve been watching you work very hard for several years to make those gatherings feel like something they don’t entirely feel like, and I can see what it costs you.”
She looked at me.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Mom,” I said. “I followed you to the pantry.”
A silence.
“Both times,” I said.
My father looked at my mother. Something passed between them that I had not seen before, which was the look of a person who has known something and is watching it be named.
“I knew she was upset,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“I’m fine,” my mother said again, but with less conviction.
“Eleanor,” my father said.
She looked at the table.
“I wanted everyone to have a good Christmas,” she said.
“We did have a good Christmas,” my father said.
“James and Simone haven’t really come in three years,” my mother said. “Grace barely speaks to James. Nate is always somewhere else in the room when the others are in it. And I watch all of this and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“You can’t fix it,” I said. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”