The last Christmas I spent pretending everything was fine, my mother served dinner for twenty-two people and cried once in the bathroom and twice in the pantry and came back to the table each time with her face composed and her smile arranged.
I know this because I followed her.
Not to comfort her. I had tried that the year before and she had held one hand up while pressing the other to her sternum and said she was fine and would I please go back to the table, which I had done, because telling someone who is crying that they are not fine is a form of rudeness that even grief manuals do not recommend.
I followed her the last Christmas to understand something I had been trying to understand for years, which was what was actually happening inside the house where I had grown up, beneath the performance that had been our family’s primary gift to itself.
What was happening, as far as I could determine from pantry surveillance, was that my mother was exhausted in the specific way of someone who has been managing a public story about their family for decades and has begun, in private moments, to feel the distance between the story and the truth.
My name is Caroline Marsh. I am forty-six years old. My parents are Eleanor and Thomas Marsh, married for fifty-one years, retired in the house where I grew up in Connecticut, nominally the center of a family gathering that has required, for as long as I can remember, a specific amount of effort to make look like what it was supposed to be.
What it was supposed to be was a close, warm, thriving family.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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