I'm 66 and I finally understand that my mother wasn't cold - she was rationing. She had a finite amount of emotional energy and five people drawing from it every day, and the distance I interpreted as indifference was a woman trying to make it to bedtime without disappearing completely. - Silicon Canals

"I walked away thinking she didn't care. I spent the next fifty-five years thinking she didn't care. I was wrong. What I mistook for distance... She was rationing. Emotional energy is finite. I know that now because I've run out of it myself."

"She worked part-time at the parish office. She came home and cooked dinner. She managed the household money, kept track of everything and everyone, ran the whole operation quietly and without complaint... She ran on a kind of reserve I didn't have the language to recognize when I was a child."

"So what I saw was a woman who didn't lean in when I talked to her. Who didn't gush, who didn't fuss, who could sit in a room full of noise and seem like she was somewhere else entirely. Who said 'that's nice' when I wanted her to say 'that's wonderful, tell me everything.'"

A man reflects on a childhood memory from age six when his mother dismissed his attempt to share something with her at the kitchen sink. For fifty-five years, he interpreted this moment as evidence that she didn't care about him. Only at age sixty-six did he understand the truth: his mother was rationing her emotional energy. Raised in a working-class Irish-American household, she managed household operations, worked part-time, and supported a tired husband and two demanding children. What appeared as distance or coldness was actually the result of finite emotional resources stretched thin by constant demands. The author recognizes this pattern in his own life, having experienced emotional depletion while running a demanding business.

Read at Silicon Canals