After about twenty of these conversations, I stopped being surprised by the anger.
The outrage was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was what sat beneath it, something quieter, more insistent, and harder to name at first articulation. Most of the people I spoke to had their tongues ready for anger and sadness. They both had less tongue for something that went under them.
It was the most frequently occurring word in various forms tired.
But it wasn’t conflict weariness or active grief. It was the particular fatigue of constant hope, the kind that builds up from years of waiting in a low-level situation for someone to become the version of you that you need.
A quiet hope. The kind on birthdays, at the start of phone conversations, at holiday dinners, the kind that quietly renews every moment, briefly holding onto the possibility that this time might be different from the last time.
What I hear is that this hope does not announce itself. This word is not like hope as we usually think of it. It’s more like a bit of physical strength before contact, expecting the other person to appear in the version of themselves that you need, or the version that you know more. And the update happens automatically, without a decision. You don’t choose to hope again after a disappointment. Hope continues on her schedule whether you invite her back or not.
Its fatigue is different from other types. Grief has a recognizable form: a weight that tends to move and shift. At least anger has direction. There is none of the weariness of long-continued hope. It builds up in such a way that low-grade physical pain accumulates not dramatically, but steadily, eventually changing your base without you even realizing it.
Most of the people I interviewed had carried this particular fatigue for decades when they sat down in front of me. Some didn’t realize what it was until they started describing it.
One thing I kept noticing was that people would describe their parents in the past tense, even when they were still alive. “He was someone who couldn’t…” “He was the kind of person who…” This happened without an obvious decision, and people often stopped when I mentioned it.
I think it reflects the truth of what this weariness eventually brings. The existing parent continues. The parent you need, the parent you’ve been waiting to meet, is quietly in the past. It’s a different kind of loss than those who make a name for themselves, and it tends to go unwitnessed for a long time.
When people reach some version of recognition that the person they’re hoping for won’t come, it rarely seems like a turning point. The people I spoke to described it as something that resolved over time rather than unfolding gradually.
And the feelings that follow tend to be a continuation of the same tedium, just without the weight of special expectations. Which, after all, can be a comfort in and of itself. But almost no one described a clear moment of letting go. Permission, if it happened at all, happened slowly and unannounced in the gaps between conversations and visits.
Not sure what to make of that as an observation, other than to say it’s worth mentioning. The cultural narrative around difficult parents tends to center on dramatic moments: confrontations, estrangements, the decision to move away or the decision to stay.
But most of the people I interviewed did not experience those dramatic moments. They lived in ordinary places. Phone calls on weekday afternoons. Birthday cards with careful handwriting. Christmas visits that everyone works for.
They were quietly weary of paths with no clear way out or clear solution. When we asked them what they needed most, the most common answer, in various forms, was simply recognition of this fatigue for what it really was, not under something easy to name.
