Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

“You’re constantly worrying about things that aren’t your business, but they’re never the things you actually want your mom to worry about; it’s always—like, things we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. You assert yourself then, when we don’t need you; and then when we actually need you you’re too busy worrying about the stupid other stuff to be there for us.”

What sounded to Julia like overcompensation was in fact just who Mark was; he was playing by the only rules he knew, rules reliant on the expectation that parents cared where their children were living, wanted to hold their grandbabies and know the origins of their nicknames, rules that expected a certain amount of reciprocity and were built on the salient foundation of love itself. He wasn’t aware that she and her mother were playing an entirely different game, one whose rules had never been written down and had also been known to change at will.

love that she’d never quite been able to define, love that wasn’t specifically anything, familial or sexual or aspirational, parental or romantic or platonic, but also wasn’t specifically not any of those things: love that was simply a point of fact, its own entity.