It means your competence becomes the reason your labor is invisible: the problem is solved, so there was never a problem, so there is nothing to thank you for.

For eight years I had been the shock absorber of that family, the soft part that took the impact so that no one else felt the road.

When the money was short, I found it.

When the schedule collapsed, I rebuilt it.

When someone was sick, the deliveries appeared; when someone was slighted, the smoothing-over got done.

And because I did it well, and did it without noise, it registered to all of them as a kind of weather — something that simply happened, reliably, like the sun, and required no more gratitude than the sun does.

The better I got at carrying the weight, the more the weight was assumed to weigh nothing.