There is a particular kind of family visit that adult children in their thirties, forties, and fifties conduct regularly, and that the wider cultural register has, on the available evidence, tended to absorb in considerably more judgmental terms than the underlying configuration actually warrants. The visit is the one the adult child makes not because they are particularly looking forward to it, not because the visit is going to produce the kind of substantive connection they might, in principle, want from a visit to their parents, but because the visit is the thing one does. The parents are alive. The parents live wherever they live. The adult child makes the visit, with whatever frequency the available logistics permit, and the visit is what the visit is.
The standard cultural framing of this configuration has tended to treat it as a kind of small moral failure on the adult child’s part. The framing suggests that the adult child should, in principle, be visiting their parents because of the substantive love that adult children are supposed to feel for the people who raised them, and that the absence of the substantive love is evidence that the adult child has, in some real way, fallen short of the configuration they were supposed to be in.
The framing is, on close examination, considerably less attentive to what is actually happening in these families than the underlying configuration would warrant. The framing assumes that the absence of the substantive feeling is the result of a particular kind of moral or emotional failure. The accurate framing is more specific. The absence is, in most cases, not the result of failure on anyone’s part. The absence is, more accurately, the structural product of how the relationship gradually settled into its current shape, across years that nobody in the relationship was particularly attending to.
How the shape actually settled, on close examination
It is worth being precise about how the shape actually settled, because the wider register has tended to absorb the process in vaguer terms than the underlying mechanism warrants.
The shape settled, in most cases, through the slow accumulation of small structural facts that nobody in the relationship was, in any single moment, deliberately producing. The adult child left home at eighteen or twenty-two. The geographical distance was established. The various small daily contacts that had constituted the texture of the family relationship were, by structural necessity, no longer available. The phone calls happened. The phone calls were, in most cases, calibrated to the surface-level register that long-distance family contact tends to settle into. The substantive material that the in-person daily contact had been carrying was, more accurately, no longer being carried by anything.
The adult child built their adult life. The parents continued in theirs. The two lives diverged, in the way adult lives are structurally designed to diverge, across the decades that followed the adult child’s departure. The divergence was not, in itself, a problem. The divergence was what adult life is. The divergence did, however, produce a particular structural condition that nobody in the relationship was equipped to address.
The structural condition was that the parents, by the time the adult child was thirty-five, were no longer fully familiar with who the adult child currently was. The adult child, by the same time, was no longer fully familiar with who the parents currently were. The relationship was operating, in most cases, on the residual model that each party had constructed of the other during the years when the in-person contact had been continuous. The residual model was, by structural necessity, outdated. The relationship was, accordingly, operating on outdated information, and the substantive connection that had been available during the years of continuous contact was no longer available at the same level.
Nobody decided this. Nobody chose the configuration. The configuration settled itself, across years that everyone involved was busy with their own lives, and by the time anyone in the relationship was in a position to notice what had happened, the shape was already structurally in place.
What the visits actually consist of, by the time the shape has settled
The visits, by the time the shape has settled, consist of a particular kind of small structured contact that the wider register has not adequately named. The adult child arrives at the parents’ house. The parents are pleased to see them. The standard small talk occurs. The various meals are eaten. The various surface-level conversations about work, weather, the news, and the various other adults the family knows are conducted. The visit ends. The adult child goes home.
What does not occur, in most of these visits, is any substantive engagement with the actual interior life of any of the participants. The adult child does not, in most cases, disclose what is actually going on in their interior to the parents, because the disclosure would require the parents to have access to information about who the adult child currently is, and the parents are, by structural necessity, operating on the residual model that does not include this information. The parents do not, in most cases, disclose what is actually going on in their interior to the adult child, for structurally similar reasons. The conversation is, accordingly, calibrated to the level of detail the residual models on each side can handle.
The visit produces, in the adult child, a particular kind of small ongoing low-grade exhaustion that the adult child has typically been registering, across decades of conducting these visits, without quite naming what it is. The exhaustion is not, on close examination, the exhaustion of difficulty. The exhaustion is, more specifically, the exhaustion of performing presence at a level the actual relationship is not, by its current structural design, capable of supporting at any deeper register. The adult child is, in some real way, doing more emotional work than the visit is structurally calibrated to absorb.
The parents, on close examination, are typically doing the same work, on their own side, without quite naming it either. Both parties are operating in good faith. Both parties are doing what the configuration permits them to do. Neither party is, in any meaningful sense, failing at the relationship. The relationship is operating at exactly the level its current structural design permits it to operate at, and the level is, on close examination, considerably below what either party would, in principle, want.
Why the obligation framing is, on close examination, partly inaccurate
The wider register has been calling this configuration obligation, with the implication that the adult child is conducting the visits without the substantive love that should, in principle, be motivating them. The framing is partly accurate. The substantive love that the wider register is calibrated to expect is not, in most cases, what is motivating the visits. The visits are, more accurately, being conducted on the basis of a different kind of motivation that the wider register has not adequately named.
The different motivation is, on close examination, the small ongoing recognition that the parents are the people who raised the adult child, that the parents are getting older, that the parents will eventually die, and that the adult child does not, in any structurally adequate way, want to be the kind of person who fails to show up during the available years. The recognition is not, on close examination, the same thing as the substantive love the wider register has been calibrated to expect. The recognition is also, by every available measure, not nothing. The recognition is, more specifically, its own form of love, calibrated to the structural realities of the current configuration rather than to the substantive intimacy that the configuration no longer supports.
This is what the obligation framing tends to obscure. The framing implies that the adult child who is visiting out of obligation is, in some real way, not loving the parents. The accurate framing is that the adult child is loving the parents in the only way the current configuration of the relationship makes available. The configuration does not make substantive intimacy available, because the substantive intimacy requires structural conditions that the relationship has not maintained across the decades since the adult child left home. The configuration does make showing up available. The showing up is, more modestly, what the love currently consists of.
Why the showing up is, on close examination, not nothing
The showing up is not nothing for several structural reasons that the wider register has not adequately registered.
The first reason is that the showing up is, by every available measure of what the parents are actually receiving, considerable. The parents do not, in most cases, particularly need or want the substantive intimacy the wider register has been calibrated to expect. The parents need, more specifically, the small ongoing evidence that they have not been forgotten, that the adult child continues to consider them part of the structural texture of their life, and that the various holidays and birthdays and Sunday afternoons will continue to include them. The showing up provides this. The showing up is, in some real way, exactly what the parents are calibrated to need at the stage of life they are currently in.
The second reason is that the showing up is, by every available measure of what the adult child is producing, real labor. The adult child is taking time away from their own life, traveling to wherever the parents live, conducting the various small interactions the visit requires, and absorbing the small ongoing emotional work the visit imposes. The labor is not, in itself, trivial. The labor is, on close examination, the structural expression of the recognition that the adult child has, in some real way, of what the parents mean to them, even when the substantive feelings the wider register has been calibrated to expect are not currently available.
The third reason is that the showing up preserves the structural possibility of the substantive feelings returning. The adult child who continues to show up across the decades of distance is, in some real way, keeping the relationship structurally available for whatever future configuration might develop. The adult child who stops showing up forecloses this possibility. The continuing-to-show-up is the structural mechanism through which the relationship remains, on close examination, a relationship at all, available for whatever the future of it might turn out to be.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
Adult children who visit their parents out of obligation rather than out of the substantive love the wider register has been calibrated to expect have not, in most cases, done anything wrong. The relationship settled into its current shape across years that nobody in the relationship was particularly attending to, on the basis of the structural facts of how adult lives diverge from family environments after the adult child leaves home. Nobody chose the configuration. The configuration settled itself.
Showing up the way the adult child currently shows up is, on close examination, its own kind of love. The kind of love is calibrated to the structural realities of the current configuration rather than to the substantive intimacy the wider register has been calibrated to expect. The kind of love is not, in itself, the version of the relationship the adult child was promised when they were a child. The kind of love is, more modestly, the version that is actually available given how the relationship has structurally developed across the intervening decades.
The available version is not nothing. The available version is what most of the visible family-relationship sustenance the wider register has been admiring across the decades of adult life is, on close examination, structurally produced by. The wider register would benefit, on the available evidence, from absorbing this with considerably more seriousness than it has so far. The absorbing would, among other things, allow the adult children currently conducting these visits to stop blaming themselves for not feeling the version of the relationship they had been promised. The not-blaming is the precondition for the underlying recognition that what they are doing is, in some real way, exactly what the current configuration of the relationship permits them to do, and that the doing is, on close examination, the structural expression of a real love that the wider register has been calibrated to not adequately recognize.
