The strong person in any family is usually not the one who has no burdens; she is the one who has learned, through long practice, to carry hers where no one can see them, so that no one will worry, so that no one will be inconvenienced, so that she can go on being the one everyone else leans on.

And the reward we give her for this, without ever meaning to, is abandonment.

We leave her utterly alone with everything, precisely because she is so good at making it look like nothing.

My mother spent fifty-three years being the strong one, and the price of her strength was that no one — not her husband while he lived, not her daughter, not anyone — ever thought to ask whether she was all right, because she never once gave us reason to think she might not be.

Her competence was her prison.