In My Family, Worry Is How We Say I Love You

Your mom calls. You don't pick up, because you're driving. She calls again. Then she texts "call me." Then, forty seconds later, "everything ok??" You have been unreachable for a grand total of ninety seconds.

This is love. In some families, love shows up as worry, and the worry doesn't come with an off switch. You didn't call back within the hour, so clearly you're in a ditch somewhere. She's already picturing the hospital. She's deciding what to wear to it.

So you go over. She asks if you've eaten. You say yes. She doesn't believe you, and honestly, she's a little bit right. A plate appears. You are thirty-eight years old. You eat the plate.

There's a whole language here that other people find intense and you find to be a normal Tuesday. The guilt isn't a weapon, exactly. It's more of an accent. "Go, enjoy, don't worry about me" means the exact opposite of every single word in it, and you both know that, and you go anyway. You worry anyway. It's a whole thing.

And here's the part nobody warns you about. You carry the voice around with you. You'll be standing in the cereal aisle, alone, a grown adult with a job, and you can hear her, clear as a bell, asking if that's really what you're having for dinner. You have put a vegetable in the cart to win an argument with a woman who is not there. She's winning. She's not even in the store.

You call her back, of course. And halfway through the call she'll mention, super casually, that your cousin got a whole promotion. No pressure. Just news. Just something she happened to remember while you were on the phone, for no reason, none at all.

It's a lot. It has always been a lot. And every so often you catch yourself doing the math on how many times she's called you today, and you realize the number is also, roughly, how many times you crossed her mind. Which is to say: constantly. Which is to say you have never, not for one single day of your life, been someone nobody was thinking about.

So yeah. You'll text her when you land. You'll eat the plate. And one day, without deciding to, you're going to hear yourself ask someone if they've eaten, in exactly her voice, and you won't even fight it. You'll know precisely where you got it.

Dr. Jené Verchick, PsyD, has written extensively about family life and sees couples and families working through these dynamics, many of them in Los Angeles's Jewish community, at her Los Angeles practice. A clinical psychologist with 26+ years, she helps families love each other without losing themselves in it.