Holding a Boundary Is Not the Same as Holding a Grudge

My mother called my baby girl chunky.

The Clue: A boundary is a rule about your own behavior. A grudge is a rule about someone else's. The difference is whether you can keep it alone, and whether you're waiting for someone who isn't coming.

Reading Time : 9 to 11 minutes

That's it. That's the wound. Well, there were other things, but it’s funny, this is what rolls off my tongue more easily.

Go ahead and have the reaction — I've had it myself, in the mirror, for years. That's what you've been carrying? A word?

Here is the part that isn't small. I asked her to stop. Nicely, the first time. Then plainly. She kept it up, making it sound ok, wrapping up in a cutesy way. So asked again, then once more, in the specific way you ask when you've stopped hoping and started documenting. And on the day of my daughter's baptism, in a white dress that had been in the family for two generations, my mother looked at her and said, “there's Chunks in her pretty white dress.”

I hated her for that then.

Not for the word. For the arithmetic. She had heard me. She had understood me. And she had run the numbers and decided that the pleasure of the joke was worth more than the cost of my asking. The word was nothing. The math was everything.

And I was not protecting my daughter from a word. I was protecting her from the long slow start of it, the running commentary that gets into girls at 4 and 5 years old and never fully leaves, that begins before they are old enough to answer back and is still going when they are 50. I had watched it happen to my friends. I had felt it happen to me. I knew exactly where it began, because it began this way, in a kitchen, with someone who loved you, saying something small.

The line I thought I was drawing

I told myself I had set a boundary. I had not.

Here is the distinction, and I offer it as someone who got it wrong for a very long time:

A boundary is a rule about your own behavior. A grudge is a rule about someone else's.

A boundary sounds like:

I don't stay in rooms where my child's body is discussed.

You can keep that one alone, in the dark, without anyone's cooperation. You can enforce it by standing up and putting on your coat.

A grudge sounds like:

she has to stop, and she has to know why, and she has to say she was wrong.

That is not a boundary. That is an invoice. And you can hold an invoice for thirty years, and interest accrues, and the debtor does not care and often does not know.

What I actually had was a request. She denied it. And then I took the denial and I filed it, and I kept the file, and I added to it, and I called the file a boundary because that word made me sound like a woman with a spine instead of a woman waiting for something.

I was waiting. That was the whole posture. I was waiting for her to hand me the thing that would make it okay.

What the word was standing in for

Because it was never really about the word. I want to be honest about what was underneath it.

My first baby was a boy. And she showed up. She was delighted, she was useful, she turned up without being asked and she stayed.

My second was a girl. And she didn't come, not the same way. The visits thinned. The help didn't arrive. The excitement that had been so easy the first time was suddenly rationed, and when I noticed it out loud there was always a reasonable answer waiting: oh, you've done this before. You're good at this now.

So I built explanations. Four or five of them, over the years, and I turned them over the way you turn over a stone you have already turned over a hundred times.

• That she couldn't bear another woman in my life, that a daughter would take me from her, or take something.

• That she had spent her enthusiasm on the boy and had none left.

• That the pulling-back was strategic. A way out of the labor that still came with a reasonable excuse.

• That her love had conditions, and I had just found one.

I believed that last one for a very long time. I was certain of it — the way you can only be certain of a thing you never have to test.

I am not certain anymore.

Here is the fact I have never once put on a page. I was 31 years old that year.

She was seventy-two.

I want to leave that where it is for a moment, because I have spent most of my adult life not looking at it.

I don't know what was happening in her body that year. I don't know what she was frightened of. I don't know what she was carrying that she had decided, in the way of women of her generation, simply not to mention. I don't know how hard it felt like driving, or what the stairs cost her, or how long she had been calculating the difference between what she wanted to give and what she had left.

And I don't know whether she had ever once in her life heard anyone say that a girl's body is not a topic. She was a child through the Depression and a girl through the war. I don't know if that sentence existed where she came from. I don't know what the word meant in the mouth of a woman who grew up watching which children were fed and which ones weren't.

I never asked. It never once occurred to me that there was anything to ask.

I built a case out of what I could see.

It turns out I could see almost nothing.

What I was actually waiting for

An apology is a transfer.

That's the mechanical truth of it, underneath all the softer language. When someone says I did that, and it was wrong, the weight moves. It comes off you and it goes onto them, where it belonged in the first place. That is why we want it so badly. Not for the words. For the redistribution.

So I waited for the transfer. Through the christening and the birthdays and the decades. Through the years we barely spoke and the years we spoke pleasantly about nothing. I was, without ever once saying it out loud, waiting for my mother to become a person who apologizes.

She was never going to become that person. She wasn't that person on the day of the baptism and she wasn't that person in her last week.

Waiting for it was always waiting for a thing that did not exist.

She's dead now

So there is nowhere left to put it.

This is the part they don't prepare you for, and the spiritual literature is worse than useless on it. When a difficult parent dies, you don't get clean grief. You get two griefs, braided together and pulling against each other: you are mourning the mother you had, and you are separately mourning the apology that will now, definitively, never come. Neither one resolves. And you cannot be openly angry about it, because she is dead, and the culture has decided that death is a form of closure, and to still be furious at a woman in the ground makes you sound like someone with a problem.

I am someone with a problem.

The problem is that I built a case for thirty years and the defendant left the courtroom.

The door I did not want

The easy version of this essay says: forgive her and be free.

I'm not going to say that. Forgiveness is not a prerequisite for peace, and anyone who tells you it is has usually never had to test the claim on anything that actually hurt.

What I'll say instead is smaller and, I think, truer:

You do not need her apology to set the weight down.

The apology was never the mechanism. It only felt like the mechanism. And as long as I believed the transfer was the only way the weight could move, I kept it exactly where it was because the only person who could move it was a woman who had already demonstrated, in a white dress, on a Sunday, that she wasn't going to.

The transfer was never coming. So the weight was always going to be mine to put down or mine to carry. Those were the only two options. There was never a third.

What I would tell you, if you're still in it

Ask yourself the ugly question. Not was I wronged, because you probably were, and it doesn't help.

Ask: is the thing I am holding a rule about me, or a rule about them?

If it's a rule about you, keep it. Enforce it. Put on your coat. You don't need their agreement, their understanding, or their remorse, and you don't owe anyone an explanation for a door you close from your own side.

But if it's a rule about them, if what you are actually holding is a demand that they change, or admit, or repent, then you are not protecting yourself.

You are waiting. And even secretly still hoping.

And you should at least know that's what you're doing, and count what the waiting is costing you, because it is costing you something, and the bill comes due whether or not they ever pay theirs.

Then ask the second question, which is worse:

How much of what I know about this person did I actually witness, and how much did I construct?

I did not ask myself that in time.

And I don't think I am unusual. I think this is one of the quietest and most ordinary things a woman does, she keeps a file, holds a request she has mislabeled as a rule, and waits for a transfer that is never going to come. It does not feel like waiting while you are doing it. It feels like having a spine.

I can't tell you what it cost me. That is the honest answer and I want to give it to you plainly. I know what it cost me to be right about her for thirty years. I cannot tell you what a different thirty years would have held, because I did not have them, and I never will.

So here is the only instruction in this essay, and it is not the one you came for.

If the person your file is kept on is still alive, go and ask them.

Not to forgive them. Not to reconcile, not to heal anything, not to arrive at some warm place where it all makes sense. Ask them what that year was like. Ask them what they were afraid of. Ask them the thing you have been certain about for 20 years and have never once said out loud in their hearing.

It may go badly. They may deflect, or lie, or say something worse than nothing at all, and you will have to carry that instead. I am not promising you an answer that heals. I am telling you that an answer, even a bad one, even a cowardly one, is a thing you can hold and turn over and argue with.

Speculation is not. Speculation only grows.

And it is very, very quiet, right up until the day the door closes and you find out what you were never going to know.

Where I've landed

Here is the thing I did not expect, and the reason I finally wrote any of this down.

I spent thirty years wanting an apology from my mother.

What I want now is a conversation.

I want to ask her what that year was like. I want to ask her what she was afraid of, and whether she knew I was keeping score, and whether the reasonable excuses were excuses, or whether they were the only true things she was able to say out loud at the time.

I want to ask her about the woman she was at 72 years old.

I am 59. I thought, when I began writing this, that age had finally let me see her, and that I had arrived somewhere close enough to understand. I had not. She wasn't fifty-nine that year. She was seventy-two. She was thirteen years further along a road I am still on, and I have no idea what is in those thirteen years. I can only just begin to imagine them. And my imagining is not the same as knowing.

That is what I got wrong, and it was never the word. It was the certainty. I was thirty-one, and I looked at a woman of seventy-two, and I believed I could read her.

The apology was always the smaller ask. I just could not see that from where I was standing.

She isn't here. That door is shut, and it is not the kind that opens.

So some mornings I still pick it up. The white dress, the word, the small pleased look on her face. I pick it up and I turn it over and I feel exactly what I felt standing in that church.

And then I put it down again. Not because I have forgiven her. Because I have finally understood that I never had all of it, that the file I kept for thirty years was thin, and partial, and assembled by a young woman who was doing her best with almost nothing.

That is not resolution. Nobody is handing me resolution.

But it is the closest I have come to setting her down gently.

Which is not the same as forgiveness. And might, in the end, be worth more.

We inherit more than we realize, the way we love, the way we withdraw, the things we learned not to say. If you're carrying something from your family that you'd like to understand, or set down, that's the work I do. Learn more about working with me.

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