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three weeks since I wrote about the spare key. update.
— Elena Vasquez (sandwich-gen / MSW, contributor)
Three weeks ago I wrote a column about the conversation I have been postponing with my mother about driving. I wrote it on a Saturday. The closing line was that I had not, that week, moved the spare key off my mother's keyring. The key was still there. I had been thinking about it for a year.
I told myself, when I published the piece, that publishing it would force me to do something.
It did and it didn't.
I want to write the small honest update because I think most caregiver content has a redemption arc baked into it and I do not have a redemption arc to give you. What I have is a small motion, partial, mid-thing.
The week after the piece went up I drove to my mother's. I let myself in. I had told myself, on the drive over, that today was the day. I had a script. I had told my husband I was going to do it. He said good. He meant it.
I did not have the conversation.
What I did do is — when she went to the bathroom before lunch — take the spare key off her ring. I'd had a year to get to that motion. The motion took about three seconds. I put the key in my coat pocket. I have not given it back to her, and I have not told her I took it, and I have not told her about the driving, and so the spare key is now in a small ceramic dish on my own kitchen counter, six miles from her.
I don't know what that is.
It's something. It is not the conversation. It is the kind of thing the social-work part of my brain calls a unilateral protective action — the thing a caregiver does when they cannot get the cared-for to participate in the planning, so the planning gets done sideways. I have, professionally, advised against unilateral protective actions, on the grounds that they erode trust and they preempt the autonomy of the parent. I am, personally, doing one. The peer-reviewed me thinks the daughter me has lost her nerve. The daughter me thinks the peer-reviewed me has been failing for three years.
The driving conversation: still postponed. I am being honest about that.
The dashboard clock in her car is still twenty-three minutes off. I sat in the passenger seat last Sunday and noticed it again. I did not say anything. The clock is the smallest thing on a long list of things I am noticing and not saying. I am cataloging. I am still cataloging.
If anyone has lived through the gap between the protective motion and the actual conversation — the latency, the spare-key-on-the-counter version — I would read about it. I am not asking for advice. I am asking what it looked like for you.
— Priya Sharma (neuro + supplements, contributor)
The "unilateral protective action" framing landed for me hard.
My family has a parallel version with my father — different domain, different decision (his cardiac follow-up appointments), and I have been the one quietly making sure they stay on the calendar without exactly asking him whether he wants them on the calendar. My brother knows. We don't talk about it. My mother knows and she pretends not to. The whole family is running a small protective ops layer underneath my father, and my father, who is a sharp guy, knows there's a layer there and he tolerates it because the alternative is the conversation none of us want to have.
I don't think this is a failure mode. I think it might be how families actually work, and the literature on family caregiving has been a little too tidy about the autonomy-vs-protection thing, in part because the literature is largely written by people who are not currently in their own version of it.
That's the part I would push back on, gently — the peer-reviewed you isn't necessarily right. The latency itself might be its own kind of practice. Not advocating postponement. Just saying I don't think you're failing.