The Weight We Carry

“I’m coming to stay with you for a while. What time will you be home?”

My father wasn’t asking. There was always a question hovering at the edge of his statements, like a paper airplane circling before its inevitable crash.

“Sure, Dad. I should be back by three. I’m making meatballs for dinner.”

“She is horrible. I am never going back.”

My father paced the living room, his socks whispering against the hardwood. “She kicked me out. Told me she’ll be dating immediately. She criticizes everything I do.”

His words unraveled, drifted off. I studied him. Still six foot five, broad-shouldered, handsome—but his back had folded inward. His body had learned to make itself smaller. Amy had taught him that.

His sky-blue eyes searched me, a child’s unguarded curiosity. He wanted guidance. Reassurance. Permission.

Their cycle repeated every month or two: blow up, collapse, beg, return. After money ran out, it worsened. Amy had demanded financial devotion from day one. And still—I liked her. She was gregarious, sharp, magnetic. She mirrored him in narcissism, but more skillfully.

I had once tried to mediate: emails drafted, phone calls listened to, couch offered. Once, in jealousy, Amy accused us of being incestuous. Maybe we were co-dependent. But incestuous? Please.

Years earlier, I had been rushing out of my daughter’s preschool, her mittened hand locked into mine as if it were an anchor. The cold burned my lungs. She had been small then, trusting, her legs pumping to keep pace with mine. I was already tired in ways I had no words for.

Overwhelmed. Not by her, but by everything pressing in around us. Loving her did not lighten it—it made it heavier. More to protect.

I knew then, standing in that parking lot, that whatever failed above me would stop with me.

I called my mother.

By the time my daughter and I slid into the cracked leather booth for lunch years later, the exhaustion was different. Tired in the way a woman gets when she’s sandwiched between generations—my twenty-one-year-old daughter, Naomi, on one side, my seventy-five-year-old mother across from us—and knowing I would be expected to translate, absorb and decipher.

The restaurant smelled of garlic, wine, and something faintly metallic, like the gold-leafed frames lining the walls, each a repository of long-past lives and conversations.

“He’s really done it this time,” my mother said, staring at the ceiling.

Naomi watched her grandmother with careful stillness. Her knees barely fit under the table. I felt the familiar tug—the urge to shield her from what I had never been shielded from.

“He’s doing well with the new company?” my mother asked. “Do you think he’ll last?”

Naomi leaned forward. “Do you think Papa could help me get an internship? Since I’m a marketing major...”

My mother didn’t hesitate. “He’s a sales rep. Marketing manager is a title he gave himself. He can’t help you. He can’t even help himself.”

Something tightened in my chest—not for my father, but for my daughter.

I spoke carefully. “I think that is his title. Even if he created it.”

My mother’s eyes darkened. “He ruined everything. Now he has no home and debt up to his eyeballs. He’s useless.”

I saw the pattern then: women in my family sharpened themselves on men, and children learned to stay very still. I chose interruption.

Karl once rolled through the dew-soaked grass outside my dorm like a golden retriever let loose. I laughed—and joined him—wetness seeping through my jeans, the smell of crushed green rising around us.

Then I noticed the flowers he’d flattened. Something broke in me. I wept over bent stems while he stared like I’d begun speaking another language.

In religion class, our professor, a tall, lanky man with wire-rimmed glasses and earnest ears that seemed too large for his head, assigned us to invent a new religion. My group met on Tuesday nights, after my workout at the gym, still damp and smelling of effort.

Sitting in Sharon’s white-walled dormitory room, I tried to focus as ideas bounced around. One girl suggested a goddess of wisdom. Another argued for a cult of perpetual youth. I interrupted with the only word that came to mind:

“Vanity.”

We all erupted in laughter. Even the gaunt art student managed a thin, halfhearted smile. We decided: Venus would be our goddess, Barbie our idol, and plastic surgeons our saints. Mirrors would line our sacred walls, so no one could ever forget to check themselves.

It was absurd. And yet, I realized, it was also frighteningly true. We were building a religion out of society’s obsession with beauty and failure. We were satirists, and simultaneously, we were confessing ourselves.

Last summer, my mother and grandmother sat me at the Formica kitchen counter.

“We’ve been talking,” Nana said.

“You’re beautiful,” my mother added. “But you do nothing with it.”

They dissected me gently, lovingly, until I sobbed.

“Don’t you want people to think you’re fabulous?”

“Aren’t you wasting your youth?”

“Are you so happy with Karl that you don’t care what other men think?”

I wasn’t happy then. I’m not happy now.

I still flinch at my reflection. Too pale. Hair too something—too brown, too blonde, never right. Features just off enough to haunt me.

Sometimes I wake from nightmares that have lingered for years. I am standing naked beneath a single yellow streetlamp on a crowded city street. People press in from all sides, laughing, pointing, whispering. Their eyes are bright with judgment. My fiancé’s laugh cuts through the din, sharp and high-pitched. Then my mother. Then my grandmother. Their voices blend into one relentless chorus of mockery.

I try to speak. My lips move, but no sound comes. My arms are not enough to shield me. I feel the heat of their scrutiny, the sting of imagined pinches and tugs, the weight of generations pressing into me. I want to run, but the street is endless, and the crowd never parts.

I wake gasping, sheets tangled around my legs, mascara streaked across my cheeks, the room dark and familiar, but still oppressive. Even awake, the echo of their voices lingers—reminding me that the lessons of beauty, perfection, and judgment are inherited.

Mirrors terrify me. They remember. My mother used to sit me before the cheval mirror, gripping my arms too tightly.

“You’ll never be naturally beautiful,” she’d say. “Your body is heavy like mine. Look at your arms.”

I learned to stare past her reflection into the wallpaper—pink carnations, blue violets, white daisies—until her voice became static.

When I think of the body now, I do not think of curves or flaws or the judgments pressed into skin.

I think of responsibility. Of what is handed down and what can be withheld. Of how exhaustion does not excuse cruelty, and love does not require silence.

I think of a small hand in mine, and the moment I understood that whatever failed above me could stop with me—at least for now.

Maybe I will carry it well. Maybe not. Perhaps the cycle will continue, or perhaps something new will emerge. All I know is that I am trying, and this is where it begins.