Should I Stay Or Should I Go

I stood at the counter and ordered the large latte with the extra shot, sliding my card across the marble without glancing at the price board. The barista smiled and asked my name. I said it without shrinking, without softening the consonants, without apologizing for taking up space. I didn’t stop myself mid-sentence. I didn’t rehearse justification in my head. I didn’t add a laugh to make myself smaller.

The cup was warm in my hands when I stepped aside. Foam kissed the lid. Cinnamon dusted the surface. For years, this moment would have come with a calculation—Do I deserve this? Should I have made coffee at home? What will Sam think if he notices the charge?—but now there was only the smell of espresso and the quiet thrill of choosing something because I wanted it.

My journals—once filled with Sam’s needs, his schedules, his stressors, his mother’s moods—were now crowded with my own name. I wrote it at the top of pages the way you write a destination before starting a map. I wrote what I felt in my body before I wrote what I thought. I wrote questions I wasn’t ready to answer and sentences that startled me with their certainty. For the first time, the pages didn’t feel like a record of endurance. They felt like permission.

I had tried to bring Sam with me. I sent screenshots and quotes, passages underlined in yellow and blue, hoping they might open a door between us. I framed them gently—This made me think of us, What do you think about this?—hoping for conversation, for recognition, for movement. But difficult conversations remained just that—difficult. He would nod. He would say That’s interesting. He would change the subject. Still, I wanted him to have the same route I was using. I wanted him to see there was another way to stand in his family without disappearing inside it. There was perhaps still time for him to change his role, to step out of formation.

Before I left for Salt Lake City to be with Jack for surgery—an old hockey shoulder injury that had finally caught up with him—I left a quiet curriculum on the kitchen counter. Not a confrontation. Not an ultimatum. Just a stack, arranged carefully, spines aligned:

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.

Self-Involved Parents.

Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents.

I held Sam’s gaze and didn’t look away until he nodded toward the stack.

“Please read them,” I said.

My voice was soft. It filled the car the way breath fills lungs—slow, deliberate, necessary.

And then I left.

Flying west, I stared out at the clouds, their tops glowing white and endless, their shadows stretching across each other like overlapping histories. My heart hammered with anticipation and dread—the familiar pairing—but something underneath had changed. I wasn’t bracing. I was alert.

I opened the books I’d brought for myself—The Myth of Normal and When the Body Says No. I read with my seatbelt fastened tight, my knees angled toward the window, my coffee cooling in the cup holder. Halfway through a chapter, I stopped breathing.

The section on autoimmune disease didn’t read like medicine. It read like genealogy.

Stress is linked to prostate cancer.

Heart disease.

Multiple sclerosis.

The words lined up with faces I knew. Monica’s trembling hands on Mother’s Day. Jerry Sr.’s waxen face in the ICU, machines breathing where his body could not. Mark’s rigid posture—always braced, always scanning, like a man expecting impact.

But the line that lodged in my chest was Maté’s research on patriarchal control and autoimmune illness.

I thought of Monica again. Her shrinking body. The way she disappeared into her chair at family gatherings, folding inward, making herself smaller and smaller until there was barely room left for her voice.

I closed the book.

At the Salt Lake surgery center, I saw it unfold in real time.

Jack lay on the narrow bed in a thin gown, his shoulder marked with a pen, the room smelling of antiseptic and recycled air. His breathing had become a sharp, high whistle. His eyes were locked on the door. His fingers drummed an erratic rhythm against the mattress.

“Mom,” he whispered.

I took his clammy hand, felt the tremor racing under his skin.

“I’m here,” I said. “I won’t leave you.”

But my voice was a bandage on a hemorrhage. His panic surged. His pupils widened until there was nothing left but his tears. I recognized it instantly—the storm I had lived inside for decades. The kind that doesn’t respond to logic. The kind that hijacks the body and makes it believe it is about to die.

“I just… I can’t,” he said, gripping the rails.

“We can wait,” the nurse offered gently, already reading the signs.

I shook my head, not at her—but at the moment.

Jack wasn’t in the room anymore. He was trapped inside a fear older than this hospital, older than this moment. Older than him.

“It’s okay,” the nurse said quietly. “We’ll reschedule.”

Relief flooded Jack’s body. His shoulders dropped. His breath slowed. His grip loosened.

There was none for me.

Walking back to the car, I squeezed his hand.

“I’m proud of you,” I whispered. “We’ll try again when you’re ready.”

But the truth followed me out the door like a shadow I could no longer ignore: this didn’t start with Jack.

We drove north to Sun Valley for my niece’s graduation. The mountains rose around us—massive, indifferent, steady. They didn’t care who we were or what we carried. Their presence was grounding, almost corrective.

We stayed with my lifelong friend Lynne. Her home wrapped around me like something living—wood floors worn smooth by decades of footsteps, windows thrown open, laughter unguarded. Her son Ryan came by with his service dog, Sunny. The last time I’d seen Ryan, he wore a Batman cape. Now he carried the quiet weight of years of bullying, shoulders sloped inward, eyes watchful.

I watched Jack explain his panic to Ryan in low, halting gestures. Sunny rested his head on Ryan’s knee, steady as gravity.

“It feels like you can’t breathe,” Jack said.

Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Sunny helps.”

Two young men, fluent in damage they should never have had to name.

Later, over wine, Lynne’s husband Jeff sat down and didn’t soften his words.

“Your family isn’t worth it, Tara.”

He let the sentence sit between the glasses like steel.

I saw Jack on the sofa, his body curled inward, exhausted from holding himself together.

And I saw the steel rolling toward him.

That night, sleep wouldn’t come. I opened my laptop in the Idaho dark. Typed. Deleted. Typed again.

I’m done waiting, Sam.

I thought of Jack in the hospital bed. Sam looking at the books the way you look at something you’re not ready to understand.

I can’t be the only one fighting for our kids.

Come with me, or stay behind. I’m not living like this anymore.

I hit send.

The quiet whoosh of the email leaving felt louder than any argument we’d ever had.

Days later, back home, Sam sat across from me at the table.

“I know you read my email,” I said. “And I asked you to read the books.”

He nodded. That familiar blankness surfaced—the one that used to make me doubt myself.

“I’ll try,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Once, that sentence would have grounded me.

Now I saw his hands shaking.

And I knew I was done waiting for him to find self-respect.

Later, with Elaine and Khaki, the question came.

“Weren’t there signs?” Khaki asked.

“Everywhere,” I said. “But no one talked about red flags then. I thought love was enough.”

“And Sam?” she asked.

“He’s not his mother,” I said carefully. “But he still flinches when she speaks. He drinks the poison because he’s afraid to name it.”

As I walked to my car, something settled.

I caught my reflection in the window—not the girl who apologized for existing, but the woman finally walking toward herself.

I didn’t check the rearview mirror.

I watched the road.

My hands were steady now, after all these years of my marriage.