Last January, I was folding laundry when I realized I’d been calling my daughter every Sunday for eight years straight. Not missing one. Not even when I had that chest infection that put me in bed for a week. I’d prop myself up on pillows and dial her number at exactly 7 PM.
That night, I put the phone down on the kitchen counter and went for a walk instead. I haven’t called since. It’s been eleven months, and she hasn’t called once.
The silence tells me everything I needed to know but didn’t want to see. I was the entire infrastructure of our relationship. The scheduler, the initiator, the one who kept the connection alive through sheer will and habit.
