the bug in being human
I'm sitting in my kitchen watching my maid clean the counter. She's telling me about her son and something in her voice makes me stop everything.
"He wants me to leave and go back to my dad's house," she says. "But I took care of him."
That last part hits me weird.
Earlier today, she told me a different story. About when her son was little and would cry all night. She didn't know what to do as a new mom but she figured it out. She took care of him however she could. Now I get what she was really saying. Those nights were building up expectations she didn't even know about.
This bothers me because I know how animals work. Most animals take care of their babies for a few days or weeks, then done. A bird kicks the baby out of the nest and moves on. No drama twenty years later. No fights about who fed who.
Humans do something totally different. We take care of our kids for years. Sometimes decades. We lose sleep, worry all the time, change our whole lives for them. That's what makes us human. All those deep feelings and complicated relationships.
What I'm realizing is this: the longer we take care of someone, the more we expect something back. Even when we don't mean to.
She wasn't calculating anything during those 2 AM cryings. But somehow, those sleepless nights were adding up. Building expectations she didn't recognize until her son basically told her to get lost. And her son doesn't remember any of it. To him, all that care just happened in the background. Invisible. She remembers everything she gave up. He remembers nothing.
I'm looking at her face and suddenly I see it. There's a bug in how we humans work. We learned to care way more than we can handle emotionally. The same thing that lets us build cities and write books also sets us up to get hurt. We put in years of work, then feel crushed when it doesn't pay off like we hoped.
It's actually best to do what animals do. Care, but don't expect anything back. Give everything during those hard years like the sleepless nights and the worry but then let go of needing anything in return.
If the kid remembers or forgets, does well or messes up, stays close or leaves, none of that changes what you gave. Those sleepless nights were worth something all by themselves. They weren't investments waiting for returns.
The weird thing about families is we can take care of people for so long but never learn when to stop expecting stuff back. We think more care equals more love, but maybe it just equals more pain.
Our kids don't owe us anything for stuff we chose to do when they were too little. If we could learn this to take care but expect nothing maybe we would hurt less.
She took care of him, he grew up, he left. That's not sad. That's just how it goes. Animals are smarter than us. They know when the job is done.