What Is the Least You Could Accept?

Sarita kept a list. It was not on paper.

Her son Varun had not come home for Diwali three years in a row. He rang on Sundays, for about eleven minutes. He told his wife’s parents about his promotion before he told her. When she had her cataract operation, he sent a basket of fruit.

Last October she said it. “If this is all we are to you, do not bother coming at all.”

He has not come. “After everything we did,” she says to her sister on the phone. “After everything.”

It begins with “should”

Families run on expectations, and the sociologist Karl Pillemer does not think that is a fault. We could hardly deal with each other without them. The trouble, he writes in Fault Lines, starts when I treat my expectations as universal law and your failure to meet them as grounds for ending things.

He quotes a saying he came across: expectations are resentments waiting to happen. A son should visit. A brother should help with the parents. A daughter should stay loyal. Rift after rift in his interviews began with a “should”.

Sometimes the standard is not in doubt. Violence and abuse are not matters of taste. But most broken expectations, he says, fall in a grey area where no rule exists. How often must a grown son come home? Nobody has written that down. So he asks an uncomfortable question. Is this unmet expectation worth the relationship?

Parents care more

That is the research finding, and Pillemer states it almost as bluntly. Studies of parents and adult children show that parents are the more invested party. They rate the relationship as more important and feel more warmly about it. To a parent, a child is partly an extension of oneself. Children, however attached, are trying to become separate people.

Many estranged parents he met held two beliefs. A good childhood earns lifelong loyalty. And family stays together whatever happens. Many of the adult children held neither. To them a stable childhood was the basic job of a parent, and they judged the relationship by how it felt now.

I do not think either side is wrong. But the consequence is plain, and Pillemer spells it out. It is easier for the child to leave. The parent has more to lose by standing on principle.

Three moves

The people in the book who reconciled dealt with expectations in three ways.

They changed the expectation and left the person alone. One woman had stopped speaking to a brother who would not help with their ailing parents. She came to see that he simply did not have it in him. Once she expected less, most of the anger went. Pillemer heard the phrase “it is what it is” again and again, and heard it as acceptance, not defeat.

They checked whether the other person had changed. A rift freezes people at the moment of the break. Pillemer compares it to the castle in Sleeping Beauty, where everyone stays exactly where they stood. He cites research on ageing which finds that people often manage their emotions better and value family more as they grow older. After ten years you may be judging someone on very old information.

And they decided the least they could accept. Against all the advice never to settle, Pillemer says reconciliation nearly always means settling. One mother agreed to every condition her daughter set, including painful ones. In time the conditions quietly fell away.

Eleven minutes on a Sunday

So is eleven minutes nothing? Or is it what a man of thirty-four, with a job and a small child, has to give?

Pillemer ends his chapter by adjusting an old phrase. You can go home again, he says, but it will not be the same home. Sarita cannot have the son who comes for a week at Diwali and sits in her kitchen. She may be able to have the one who rings on Sundays. She has to decide whether that is worth having. I think it is.