The Decision She Did Not Want

For the woman who did the right thing and got no thanks for it.

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Good morning.

There is a kind of love that gets thanked for, and there is a kind that does not.

Most of what we picture when we think about caring for somebody is the first kind. The meal you brought. The hand you held. The visit that made her whole afternoon. That love comes back to you the same day it leaves your hands.

This week I have been doing the other kind.

I had to make a decision about my mother's care that she did not want me to make. And she let me know she did not want it.

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I am going to be careful here, because that woman is entitled to her privacy and to her dignity, and I am not going to trade either one for a good paragraph. So I will tell you my side of it and leave hers alone.

I have spent my whole life not wanting my mother upset with me.

I do not know how to explain that to somebody who did not grow up trying to be the easy one. But if you did, you already know. There is a wiring in some of us that reads her displeasure as an emergency. Fix it. Smooth it over. Find the version of this where she is not unhappy.

This week there was no version where she was not unhappy.

There was a version where she was safe and a version where she was comfortable, and I had to pick one of them. I picked safe. Then I sat in the room afterward with what that cost.

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Nobody warns you that this part is coming.

They tell you caring for a parent will be tiring. They tell you it will be expensive and complicated and that you should get your paperwork in order. Not one person tells you that a day will arrive when you are the one she is upset with, and that you will have earned it by doing the right thing.

And here is what came at me in that room, which I have not said out loud until now.

The question was not, did I decide correctly. The question was sharper than that.

Am I doing this for her, or am I doing this for me?

Because that question has teeth in it. Am I choosing this because it is what she needs, or because I am worn down? Because it is easier for me? Because I have reached the end of what I can do and I am dressing that up as wisdom?

I have turned that over more times this week than I want to admit to you.

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Here is where I have landed, and I hand it to you in case you are turning over the same question in the dark.

Being tired does not make you wrong.

Both things were allowed to be true at the same time. I was at the end of what I could safely do, and it was still the right call. My exhaustion did not create the situation. It only made me finally willing to look straight at what was already there.

For a long time I could see it out of the corner of my eye and keep going. Tired is what made me stop and turn my head.

And her being upset with me is not evidence that I chose wrong.

People hand their anger to whoever they trust most not to leave. She is losing things she never agreed to lose, and I am the safest person in her world to be angry at. Somewhere in her, she knows I am not going anywhere. That is why she can afford it.

Being trusted with somebody's anger is not the same thing as deserving it.

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I have been sitting with the same verse for two weeks now, and this week it opened up on me.

“Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”

Galatians 6:2

Read that again.

I always heard that verse as the gentle version. Carry her groceries. Sit with her in the waiting room. Take a turn so somebody else can sleep.

But some burdens cannot be shared. They can only be transferred.

There are days when bearing somebody's burden means carrying a decision she is no longer able to carry herself, and then absorbing what it costs her to have had it made for her. You take the weight, and you take the disappointment that comes attached to the weight. Both of them. That is the whole burden, and God did not ask you to carry only the comfortable half of it.

I do not think that verse was written about groceries.

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Now let me put a fence around this, because this is not a letter about overriding people.

A grown woman's no is not an obstacle to be routed around. Most of the time your job is to honor what she wants even when you would have chosen differently, and especially when the only thing at stake is your own convenience. Take away somebody's voice in her own life and you have not protected her. You have made her smaller.

So here is the honest test I have been using, and I offer it to you plainly.

Would I still make this decision if it made my life harder?

If the answer is yes, you are standing on ground that will hold. If the answer makes you flinch, sit with it longer, and bring somebody into the room who has no stake in how it turns out.

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Your invitation this week is not a task. It is a sentence, and I want you to say it out loud somewhere nobody can hear you.

I would rather she be safe and upset with me than comfortable and in danger.

Say it until your chest stops fighting it. It took me several days and I am not finished.

Then do one more thing. Tell one person what you decided and why. Not so they can talk you out of it, and not so they can approve it. So that you are not the only one holding it. A decision carried alone gets heavier every night. A decision somebody else knows about stays the same size.

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I am not through this. There are more decisions in front of me and I do not have them worked out, and some evenings I do a poor job of trusting that it will come together.

But this is a season. It is not the rest of your story.

And I keep coming back to the same place. The love that never gets thanked for is not the lesser love. It costs more than the other kind, and you give it anyway, and God sees the whole transaction even when the person in front of you cannot.

She does not have to understand it today for it to be love.

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Being tired does not make you wrong.

Being trusted with somebody's anger is not the same as deserving it.

The love that goes unthanked is the costliest kind. Give it anyway.

Walking with you,

Your sister in the rebuild,

Kimberly

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P.S. Thank you for every prayer you have prayed over my mother and over our family. Please keep praying for her, and if you think of it, pray for wisdom for me. I am making decisions I would rather somebody else was making, and I am asking God for clarity every single morning.