The Curriculum Did Not Cover This

Rescuing my parents is not something they prepared me for in school. Nor in television shows, nor in the books I have been poring over for decades — and there are rather a lot of them, covering subjects as varied as the human condition, the collapse of civilisations, and the precise etiquette of afternoon tea (yes, I wasted a few hours on that last one), none of which, it turns out, contain a chapter on this. It arrives not as a single moment but as a cascade, settling over every waking hour with the particular weight of things that cannot be unknotted, accompanied by an anxiety that has a specific and not entirely flattering name: helplessness.

The irony is not lost on me. I, who still meanders through fragments of a life that is barely stitching itself together — who treats adulthood less as an achieved state than as an ongoing improvisation — am apparently the one being called upon. The curriculum did not cover this. The television shows, for all their dramatisation of every conceivable human crisis, somehow skipped it. And the books, bless them, were busy with other things.

And yet. There is something that happens in the space between the helplessness and the showing up — a quiet, slightly absurd, entirely involuntary decision that precedes any rational calculation. Not because one is qualified. Not because one knows what one is doing. But because the alternative, it turns out, is not something one is capable of choosing. This, I suspect, is what love looks like when it has run out of the more photogenic options. It's also an exercise in extreme patience -- because the feeling of wanting to bonk your head against a wall or scream at these rather annoying presences in your life is constant.