It’s an old trope: the codependent woman, long pulled down by her husband’s alcoholism, makes a U-turn. She sheds her codependent skin and becomes hyper-independent.

Both my mom and my mother-in-law were once on the codependent superhighway and got off at the exit that read self-reliance. I give them credit. It makes perfect sense. Do the opposite of what you’ve been doing. Give that a try.

My Mom

My mom is eighty-three, lives alone, and only accepts help begrudgingly. Last week after birding she tripped over a curb while eating ice cream. Someone in her birding group took her to the ER. After a CAT scan and stitches, they sent her home with her dominant arm in a sling and directions to only eat soft foods for six weeks. She’d fractured her jaw and elbow.

Mom didn’t call me right away. In fact, I called her two days after the accident. We made small talk for a few minutes. She was slurring her words so I asked if she’d been day drinking, which would be out of character because Mom allows herself one small glass of wine only after five.

Mom let it slip that her jaw was broken. Then she told me not to worry since she’d had a CAT scan, and they didn’t think she’d gotten a concussion. I asked if she was eating okay, and she told me she couldn’t shop or drive because of her broken elbow. Then she admitted she needed me to come down next week and drive her to the doctor’s so she could get her stitches removed.

I took the two-hour drive to Tucson and found her nested in bed like a wounded bird. She took long naps with her mouth wide open, and her right wing attached to her chest.

We shopped for soft foods and made broth, smoothies, and soft pancakes. I froze meals. I watched my mom pour soup with her non-dominant hand into her half-open mouth. She slurped like a seal honks.

Once we got her more independent, the quiet of her house, the regular rhythm of three meals and an errand began to feel oppressive so I opened the conversation to me leaving or us returning to my house. She didn’t want to sleep in my guest room or hear my loud family while she was napping.

“But when you leave I’ll be lonely,” she said.

You already are, I wanted to reply.

My Mother-In-Law

My mother-in-law comes over, and opens the door without knocking. I’m the only one home. She carries her purse on the crook of her arm, walks in, and sits with a humph. Her white purse rests on her lap. I can almost picture a document above her head, a list of things she needs to get out. She’s practiced.

“Kathryn,” she says. “About Thanksgiving.” She pauses.

No, she did not ask how I am or what I’m doing, or if this is a good time. She starts abruptly because, in her head, she’s in the middle of this conversation, it’s been rolling through her mind for the last few days. She’s picked apart her word choice. Should she start with self-deprecating humor, You know I’m a control freak. Or would it be better to casually ask a question like, Did you order the turkey?

“I heard I’m not doing the turkey this year, so who is and where are they buying it?” She winces since I can tell she meant to ask one question at a time and let the conversation flow. Pull me in.

I shrug, “It’s on the Google doc. I can’t remember.”

“You know there are fourteen of us.”

The conversation goes round and round. She doesn’t want a frozen turkey, wants it cooked in the bag. The plastic bag. She doesn’t question that some would find a plastic bag unappetizing.

I finally check the Google doc and my own mother signed up for the turkey. My mother-in-law signed up for gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. She bought good pots and pans for the rental unit.

My mother-in-law explains the best way to make stuffing, which is inside the turkey, and needs to know if that’s my mother’s plan. I have no idea. She tells me which grocery has the best fresh, non-frozen turkeys, and how to get them on sale. I don’t have rejoinders to any of her turkey-related statements.

I do know that just a few Thanksgivings ago my mom bought a frozen turkey Thanksgiving morning and then proceeded to cook it for my sister and her family. The dinner was supposed to be served sometime in the afternoon. At ten that night they gave up, since the little red thermometer refused to pop. It’s funny now, they laugh about it. I don’t tell my mother-in-law this story.

As luck would have it my mom arrived Thanksgiving weekend with a frozen 30-pound turkey in a giant cooler, packed with ice.

There were gasps.

Me

There’s the old saying that whenever you point a finger, you’ve got three others pointing back at you, which is ironic seeing as how I have three boys.

I also have a husband. The build-up to Christmas started this summer. My immediate family, plus my mother and sister-in-law and her family decided to ski near my dad in Colorado. My mother-in-law picked the dates and reserved a condo for their side of the family. My husband and I reserved our own hotel, based on her dates.

At the last minute, their reservation fell through and although they were able to secure a new reservation, their dates shifted two days to the right. Which, if you think about it could be perfect, five days together, sandwiched between two days, on our own, on either side.

Except, she just got cataract surgery and it didn’t go as planned. Now, she needs someone to drive her the twelve hours there. My husband came to me hoping I’d have a solution. At least I think that’s what he wanted. We’ll never know. Because the second he told me she’d need someone to drive her two days early and then return two days early, I lost it. I don’t think I listened, I cocooned up in our room, Netflix and hot tea. Sleep. I grumbled and threw dirty looks. In my head, he’d picked her over us. He didn’t give me, after twenty-five years of marriage, priority. He picked her.

The two of us bickered, in nonsensical sentences. He wanted to know why I wouldn’t want to drive out early and start the vacation. He reminded me that I love to ski. I said if that sounded so lovely, why didn’t he go then? He slept on the couch, and I lay upstairs alone, like my two mothers in their own respective houses, unable to relate to someone else.

The funny thing about humility is that if I scratch at it, it leaves me breathless.

When I looked at the situation I found two fast alternatives: I could become hyper-independent or codependent. I didn’t like either.

What looked the hardest, what hurt the most, was to be open and humble. Open to what’s best for me, and what’s best for others. Webster defines humility as a low view of someone’s importance, which is absolutely inaccurate. Humility is seeing myself as an equal child of the world.

I scratched around my ego and apologized, told my husband I feel like he doesn’t care. And I know, this is a silly first-world problem. There are families being torn up by war, this is less than nothing. Neither of us has a solution, but that feels like a safe place to sit.

As if in a cosmic joke, the phone rings. It’s his mom. She’s mapped out what she must do before the trip and now needs someone to drive her even earlier. Her reasoning? She insists on breaking up the 12-hour drive into two days, and she needs an extra day to grocery shop at a Costco in Colorado.

He hangs up the phone.

All of this feels like a fever dream. Because the words Christmas and alone and torn apart family aren’t the first time we’ve heard them.

When the two of us hit a rough patch about six years ago, we saw a therapist. She worked in an office with thin walls and department store decor. One time as the two of us were huddled on opposite sides of the couch she asked my husband to leave the session and then had a heart-to-heart with me. The therapist had left her husband. He hadn’t been abusive. But things weren’t ideal. Now, Christmas she was alone, her family torn apart. She wasn’t sure it was worth it.

We used that story for a while on each other. If one of us was being inconsiderate the other would say, is it worth having Christmas alone? Almost as a joke, but not really. And yet, here we are.