The Text My Mother Sent

My mother sent a text last week asking how I was managing.

She didn't mean how I was emotionally. She meant: who is doing the household administration. This is a distinction she'd never make explicitly, because in her vocabulary managing and doing the household are the same word. They've always been the same word.

She asked because she was checking. Because I'm her daughter, and in her model of the world, the daughter is the one who manages — and she wanted to know if I was coping with the weight of it all.

I told her things were going well.

She said: good, as long as you're not doing everything yourself.

She meant this as caution. She's watched me do everything myself before. What she didn't say — what she can't quite say because it was her way too — is that she also taught me to do everything myself. That the competence I'm trying to redistribute was, in part, a gift from her.

The invisible load passes through generations like furniture. You inherit it without a conversation. You only notice it when you're trying to put it down and realise you don't know how to not hold it, because you've been holding it since before you were old enough to have a choice.

She's in her eighties. She still manages the household. She still knows where everything is. She checks the expiry dates. She tracks the appointments.

I called her after I sent the text, and we talked about something else entirely.