Who Are You When the Role Ends?

For twenty-six years I was the mother of Jai and Ila. I knew whose tiffin was whose, and who had an exam on which day. My younger one left for Pune in July.

I cook for two now and there is food left over. My husband says, “At last you can relax.” I do not know what to do with myself at four in the afternoon. I was good at this job. It ended without notice, and nobody gave me a farewell.

Nalini, you were good at it. I think that is why four o’clock is so hard. A job you were merely adequate at would be easier to put down.

Two ways of playing

In The Upside of Uncertainty, Nathan and Susannah Furr borrow a distinction from the scholar James Carse. He divided people into finite and infinite players. A finite player accepts the role and the rules as given, and plays to win. An infinite player treats roles as temporary and rules as open to question, and plays so that the game can go on.

The difference shows most when something ends.

When the role becomes the person

The Furrs observe that we tend to identify ourselves with the parts we play: the job, the marriage, being someone’s parent. Once we do, failing at the part, or losing it, feels like failing as a person. Their examples are redundancy and divorce, which they say can crush an identity.

Seen another way, a role is temporary, it changes, and it is separate from who you are. Then its ending becomes an invitation to reinvent it.

They include a phrase that I am glad of. The reinventing comes, they write, after taking time to absorb the loss. Your husband’s “at last you can relax” skips that part. Something has been lost. It can be mourned before it is replaced.

A rule, or the purpose?

The question from their chapter that I find most useful is this one. What did I take to be essential in this role that was really invented?

The tiffins were a rule. So were the exam timetable and the three o’clock snack. They were good rules, and they belonged to a stage that has ended. None of them was the purpose.

The Furrs describe asking the larger question at a hard moment of their own. Their eldest child came out as transgender, and they found themselves pulled between strong feelings, a conservative upbringing and advice from every side. They asked what a parent’s role would be in an infinite game. Their answer was unconditional love. They say it calmed them at once and opened the way to healing and trust.

Your purpose was never the tiffin either. A daughter in Pune still needs whatever it was. She needs it in a different form, and probably less often than you would like.

Being ready for surprise

Carse drew a line that the Furrs quote. Training, he said, prepares us against surprise. Education prepares us for it.

Twenty-six years trained you superbly for a household that no longer exists. You are being asked to become educated, in his sense, for one you have not met yet. That is uncomfortable at any age.

The chapter also makes a case for play, drawing on the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who thought that playing should not stop when childhood does. I pass that on because four in the afternoon is an hour with nothing depending on it. You could try things in it badly.

What they do not claim

The Furrs do not pretend this is easy. Life, they say, pushes us into games we would never have chosen, and they are not trying to make light of how hard those are.

Nor is anyone suggesting that you were only a role. The suggestion runs the other way. You are larger than the job you did so well, and the part of you that did it has not gone to Pune.