When I was in eighth grade, I spent one afternoon each week with an elderly woman named Raisie who lived a block down from my mother’s house. She paid me to do an unhelpful job of helping her with non-essential tasks. I took a shovel to the weeds in her lush backyard while she supervised in a white lawn chair, sinking into its soft algae spots. She had a doll house made of fragile wooden sticks that had been damaged, and I sat on the carpet of her perfumed bedroom trying to glue it back together. My fingers were clumsy, and I left beadlets of glue in the seams of the house, but Raisie didn’t mind. She mourned that her children and grandchildren never visited her, and I knew that my home repairs were secondary to the company I gave her. One day, I just stopped visiting her, too. The more that she grew to trust me and expect my visits, the intimacy and emotional responsibility became overwhelming to me.

Raisie’s spine was rounded from age and orthopedic damage. When she walked, her torso curled to face the floor. She careened forward, all her weight upheld by her blistered, white-knuckled grip on her cane. One night I imitated her walk to my mother, tiptoeing and lurching my body forward in an exaggerated curve. My mom paused with true disappointment, then said “that’s really not nice, Em.” Beneath the deflection mechanism of my mocking was the pain I felt watching Raisie navigate her home – insisting on taking pots and ladles down from their pegs on the canary yellow walls of her kitchen, insisting on walking from the ottoman to the brocade couch holding albums in her arms, insisting on walking at all. The home was like a museum of a family’s life, necessarily frozen in time in a way that her bones and joints couldn’t be. The home that ostensibly gave her autonomy was also an unrelenting burden to her body. I felt inadequate in my ability to help and ashamed that she was in a position to depend on my help in the first place. Only now can I name a deeper shame: that Raisie’s fate might be mine, too. That domesticity would grow big around me, subsume me like a weed.

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