We Stopped Trying to Fix Each Other — and That's When We Finally Talked

The drive from Knoxville to my mom's house in Maryville is exactly 22 minutes. I know this because I've made it roughly four hundred times in my adult life, and for probably three hundred and fifty of those trips, I spent at least half the ride either bracing for something or recovering from it.

Not because my mom is a bad person. She is, genuinely, one of the most loving humans I've ever encountered. But loving someone and knowing how to be with them are two entirely different skills, and for a long time, neither of us had figured that out.

The Pattern We Didn't Know We Were In

Here's how it usually went: I'd mention something hard — a rough week at work, a fight with my partner, a decision I was wrestling with — and within about forty-five seconds, my mom would be in problem-solving mode. Suggestions. Reframes. The occasional gentle redirect toward what she thought I should be feeling instead of what I actually was.

She wasn't wrong, exactly. Her advice was often pretty solid. But there was something about receiving it that made me feel like I'd been handed a permission slip to stop feeling whatever I'd just admitted to feeling. Like the emotion had a shelf life, and she was trying to move us both past it as quickly as possible.

So I stopped bringing things up. And she, sensing the distance, started filling the silence with more questions. And I'd give shorter answers. And the 22 minutes started feeling a lot longer.

What I didn't know — what I couldn't have known from inside it — was that she was doing the exact same thing with me.

"When you'd shut down, I'd panic a little," she told me later. "And when I panic, I talk. I try to solve things. It's how I was raised — you don't sit in a problem, you get out of it."

Two people, both trying to help, both making it worse.

The Afternoon It Shifted

I can tell you the exact day it changed, which feels almost too neat to be true, but here we are.

It was a Sunday in late October, that particular kind of gray afternoon that makes everything feel a little more honest than usual. I'd driven down after a genuinely brutal few months — a miscarriage I hadn't fully processed, a job situation that was quietly unraveling, and the low-grade exhaustion that comes from holding too much for too long.

I hadn't planned to say any of that. I'd planned to eat her pot roast and talk about the neighbors and drive home.

But somewhere on Route 129, something just came out. All of it, kind of at once, in that rambling way things do when you've been keeping them in too long. And I remember finishing and waiting — actually tensing up — for the response.

And my mom said: "That sounds really, really hard."

That was it.

No follow-up questions. No reframe. No silver lining. Just — that sounds really, really hard.

I started crying in a way I hadn't in months. Not the tight, controlled kind. The other kind.

She didn't try to stop it. She just kept driving.

What She'd Been Working On

I found out later that she'd been seeing a therapist for about six months at that point — something she'd started quietly, on her own, after my grandmother's death had knocked her sideways in ways she hadn't anticipated. One of the things she'd been actively practicing was what her therapist called "tolerating the discomfort of not fixing."

"She told me that when someone shares pain with you, your job isn't to make it go away," my mom explained. "Your job is to let them know they're not alone in it. Those are completely different jobs."

She'd been practicing on smaller things — conversations with friends, interactions at work. But she hadn't tried it with me yet, because I was the one she most wanted to protect, which meant I was also the one she most instinctively tried to rescue.

That afternoon, she said, she just decided to try it. To sit in it with me instead of pulling us both out.

What Happened After

Something loosened between us after that drive. Not all at once — it wasn't some movie-style transformation. But over the next few months, I started talking to her more. Telling her things I'd been editing out for years. And she, in turn, started sharing things with me that she'd always kept tidy and resolved before bringing them up.

We started having the kind of conversations where neither of us knew exactly how they'd end. Which sounds small, but if you've spent years in relationships where everything gets wrapped up before anyone can feel too much, you know how radical that actually is.

I also had to look at my own side of it. Because I'd been doing the same thing with her — just in a different direction. When she'd bring up worries or fears, I'd rush to reassure her. You're fine, Mom. You've handled harder things. You'll figure it out. All technically kind things to say. All technically ways of telling someone their feelings were a problem to be solved.

We'd both been doing it. We'd just been doing it at each other.

The Thread We Kept Missing

There's something about a car that makes certain conversations easier. You're side by side instead of face to face. You have somewhere to look that isn't each other. There's a destination, which means the conversation has a natural end — you can't get stuck in it forever.

Maybe that's why so many of the real ones happen there.

But I think what actually changed for us wasn't the location. It was the decision — quiet and unannounced — to stop treating each other's pain as something that needed to be corrected. To let it just be what it was. To stay in the car with it instead of rolling down the windows and pushing it out.

My mom said something to me recently that I keep coming back to. She said: "I spent so long trying to give you answers because I thought that's what love looked like. But I think what you actually needed was for me to just agree that the question was hard."

Twenty-two minutes. Four hundred drives. And it turned out that's all it ever took.