You Can Love Them and Still

My mother has this way of asking a question that isn't a question. "You're not wearing that, are you?" delivered with a tilt of the head and a smile that says she's already decided the answer. She's been doing it since I was fourteen, and I'm only now learning to hear the sentence under the sentence: I love you. I'm afraid for you. I don't know how to say either of those things directly, so I'll fix your outfit instead.

I used to absorb every suggestion, every tilted head, swallowing them like vitamins I didn't need. Now I laugh sometimes and say, "Yep, wearing this," and the world doesn't end — she moves on and I stay dressed.

That tiny nothing of a moment took me years.

The ghost

My mom is a wonderful person. I want to say that upfront because the story I'm about to tell isn't about a bad mother. It's about a daughter who didn't know how to be honest with someone she loved, so she disappeared instead.

We'd talk sometimes every other day, and then I'd just... stop. Ghost her. Not because I was angry or because anything had happened, but because somewhere along the way the conversations started to feel like work, and I didn't have the words to explain why without sounding like a terrible daughter. So I'd go quiet, and the guilt would settle in like a low-grade fever that never quite broke.

I loved her. I didn't want to hurt her. And I convinced myself that silence was the kinder option, that if I just pulled back a little she wouldn't notice, or if she did, it would hurt less than whatever clumsy truth I might say out loud.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, who wrote Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, describes a pattern she calls emotional loneliness — that feeling of being with someone you love and still walking away feeling unseen, not because they're cruel but because the connection requires you to tuck some part of yourself away. What I'd add to that, from my own life and from my work, is that silence is the most common boundary people set with the people they love, and it's the one that costs the most, because it protects you by erasing you. You don't leave the relationship. You just stop being fully in it.

That was me for years. Present but holding my breath.

The sentence I keep hearing

In my work, people say a version of the same sentence at least twice a week. It always breaks in the middle.

I could set a boundary, but—

But she'd be hurt. But he'd think I don't care. But they need me. But the guilt. But what if everything changes.

I let the sentence sit. I never finish it for them, because the real question isn't on the other side of "but." It's underneath.

Am I allowed to love someone and also say what's actually true?

Nobody taught us that love and honesty live in the same room. We learned, somewhere along the way, that real love means absorbing it. That the kind thing is to hold your tongue. That bringing something up would just make it worse.

So we confuse silence with kindness. Swallowing with patience. And we wonder why it gets harder to pick up the phone.

The six times

As my mom got older, something shifted that made the silence harder to justify. She'd ask me the same question I'd already answered, sometimes six times over three weeks, and each time my jaw would tighten a little more. I'd think, she's not listening to me, and instead of saying that, I'd shut down. Treat her to the same quiet withdrawal I'd perfected since my twenties.

But the clock is ticking. I know that now in a way I didn't used to, and it changed the math. The cost of silence wasn't just my comfort anymore, it was time I wouldn't get back with a person I genuinely love.

So I said the thing. Not rehearsed, not softened into something unrecognizable, just the truth in plain language: "Mom, you're asking me the same question I've answered six times over the past three weeks. I feel like you're not listening to me."

I braced for the hurt. The guilt. The part where I'd spend the rest of the day wishing I'd kept my mouth shut.

She laughed.

"Oh, Carie. It's not that I'm not listening. My short-term memory is gone. I can't remember what I did last week, let alone what someone told me three weeks ago."

Bandaid off, no more bleeding. And I got back the breath I'd been holding every time she called, because the thing I'd been treating as evidence that she didn't care was just a seventy-something-year-old woman whose brain files things differently than it used to. That's it. That was the whole monster under the bed.

What silence costs, and what honesty gives back

The relationships we protect with silence are the ones we're slowly leaving. Not dramatically, not all at once, but one avoided conversation at a time, one withheld truth, one more week of ghosting instead of just saying the thing.

With parents especially, we hold back. With the people we love most, we hold back. We tell ourselves it's out of respect or kindness or not wanting to rock the boat. But I think the boat is already rocking. We're just pretending we can't feel it.

The boundary I set with my mother wasn't distance. It was honesty. I stopped disappearing and started saying what was actually true, and what I got back was a relationship with more air in it, more room for both of us to be real, more laughter than I expected.

What if the relationship you keep protecting with silence could breathe better with a little more truth?