As you grow older, you begin to fear even for the things you would never trade away.
For the children you love more than you know how to explain. For the parents whose missed call makes you call back immediately. For the home where someone sleeps peacefully because they trust that tomorrow you will know what to do. For the people whose work in your company pays their bills and feeds their families. Everything most precious to you also becomes a place where you are most vulnerable.
The responsibility that comes with age has a weight that is hard to understand when you are young. Back then, it seems enough to be capable, hardworking and persistent. Later, you realise how much can happen despite everything you have done right. And you keep working, now aware that your effort cannot protect everyone.
The way you grow tired changes too. Your body stops, but your mind is still checking on everyone you care about. Did you hurt someone with your tone? Did you overlook a problem? Will you make it in time? Is there enough? Who told you today that they were fine, and you did not believe them?
Then you come home. Someone is happy to see you, someone hugs you, someone immediately starts telling you what happened to them. You listen and try to be present. The phone rings again. For a moment, you close your eyes before answering. You want your family to have all of you, yet you feel you have spent yourself in every direction during the day.
It hurts most when you hear: “You’ll know what to do.”
It is said with trust, perhaps even with love. And your throat tightens because that day you do not know how to go on yourself. You need someone with whom you can lower your voice, sit down and admit that you are afraid. Someone who will stay beside you even when you have no solution.
More and more often, you catch yourself wanting to call your parents, as you once did, to tell them what is troubling you. Then you think of their age, their medical appointments and their worries, so you begin the conversation by asking how they are. You leave your own trouble for another time. When the call ends, you stay there a little longer with the phone in your hand.
Perhaps that is when you feel most clearly how much you have grown up. You still need someone to care for you, yet you are already carefully weighing how much of your own worry you can give them.
So when you ask someone close to you how they are tonight, wait for the answer. Look at them. Do not move straight on to what you need.
Perhaps they have been looking for a way to tell you they are struggling for a long time. Perhaps they will manage it for the first time if they feel that tonight there is time for them too.
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