In my family, there was a word they used for me that sounded like a compliment and functioned like a category. The word was flexible. Flexible meant I would share my room when Madison needed more space.
Flexible meant my recital could be rescheduled when it conflicted with her travel volleyball tournament. Flexible meant I understood. Flexible was code for something else entirely, and it took me twenty-four years to find the right translation.
Madison was four years older than me, and she had our mother’s blonde hair and our mother’s green eyes and our mother’s laugh, the whole physical and social inheritance of that side of the family. I took after our father’s people: darker hair, quieter manner, a tendency to watch a room rather than fill it. Our mother Linda was not a cruel woman in any dramatic sense.
She was the kind of mother who loved her children in proportion to how easy they made her life, and Madison, simply by being the version of a daughter that Linda recognized as valuable, made her life considerably easier than I did. I don’t say this to invite pity. I say it because it matters to understanding everything that happened later, and because I spent most of my childhood not understanding it myself.
I thought I was missing something, some quality or skill that would unlock the version of my mother that I could see her apply to my sister, the warmth and attention and the way she would stop what she was doing to really listen. I tried to earn it in the ways available to a child: good grades, compliance, the particular exhausting performance of never needing anything that might inconvenience anyone. By twenty I had stopped trying and started building my own life instead.
I worked as a freelance content writer, remote work that paid better than my mother acknowledged since she considered it a hobby with an uncertain future rather than a career. I had my own apartment, my own schedule, my own bills paid from my own income. My mother described this arrangement at family dinners as though it were a temporary embarrassing phase: when are you getting a proper career, when are you going to do something real, Madison has a husband and a baby on the way, what do you have.
The question contained its own answer in the way certain questions do, telling you what the person asking them already believes rather than genuinely seeking information. What my mother did not know, or did not consider relevant, was that I had been video-calling my grandmother Eleanor every Sunday for two years. While Madison’s mandated twice-monthly visits lasted thirty minutes at most, my grandmother and I would talk for hours, covering the breadth of her long and interesting life: her marriage to my grandfather, her garden, the books she was reading, her thoughts on the news, the particular quality of a life lived with intention.
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