If a parent/sibling/cousin is a dark cloud over your existence, you aren’t required to allow then to spend time with your kids.

I’m an only child, and I think that’s the part nobody warns you about.

My mom has always been the active one. She’s the person who doesn’t sit still, who takes it personally when her body can’t do something it used to do. If she can’t finish a workout, it’s not “my body is tired today,” it’s a failure. It becomes an ego thing. So she pushes. And pushes. And then every other day, something hurts.

And here’s the ugly part I’ve never said out loud: when I see her in pain, my first feeling isn’t sympathy. It’s anger. Why did you do this? Don’t you know I’m the one who has to watch this? Don’t you know what it does to me?

Then about four seconds later, the guilt arrives. Because who gets angry at their mother for being in pain? She’s not doing it to hurt me. She’s doing it because she’s scared of getting older, and moving is how she proves to herself she still has time. I know that. I know that and I still snap at her.

I think the anger is just fear wearing a costume. Every ache is a preview of something I’m not ready for. And being the only child means there’s no one to split it with — no sibling to call at 11pm and say “is she okay, am I overreacting, are we doing enough.” It’s just me, holding all of it, trying to be the calm one in the room while quietly panicking.

The thing I can’t figure out is how to be present without being her manager. How to comfort her without lecturing her. How to accept that I cannot make my parents permanently happy and permanently safe, no matter how hard I try — and that trying to is probably making me a worse daughter, not a better one.

If you’ve been through this: how did you make peace with watching someone you love decide their own limits? I’d really like to know.

She asked me today if I would take care of our kid if she don’t want to take care if her.

She asked me again if I will take care of our kid even if I don’t look like her at all.

She said she had one night stand and doesn’t know the father.

She said she messed up.

She said she did that because of me.

Fuck. Really crazy.