▸ Column · Contemporary American — Omni-Man's Earth, the grounded Invincible setting (modern day)
OMNI-MAN replies.
The letter
For thirty-eight years my mother Cecilia has had something to say about everything I do. My weight. My job teaching middle school (which she calls "settling"). How I'm supposedly ruining my own kids by letting them have screens. I've been half-ignoring it for decades, honestly.
The breaking point was my daughter Ellie's birthday party last month. Cecilia pulled me into the kitchen to tell me my dress made me look like a sausage, and — I'm not kidding — that "no wonder" my husband travels so much. I blocked her number and email the next morning. I have slept better for three weeks than I have in years.
Now my brother Mason keeps texting that I'm "tearing the family apart" and that she's getting older and I should think about that. And the guilt is starting to creep back in, which I hate. Am I a monster for choosing peace, or am I finally just done?
— Finally Sleeping in Phoenix
Omni-Man replies
Thirty-eight years. You kept count because the count is honest — a fair accounting of what was taken from you, one comment at a time.
The block was not monstrous. You protected yourself. That is not cruelty.
Now think. Not about Mason's texts — Mason is telling you what guilt sounds like in someone else's voice. That is noise. Think instead about what the guilt itself is telling you, because you asked the wrong question.
You did not ask: Should I unblock her? You asked: Am I done? These are not the same decision.
The block is right. Do not lift it. But "done" — final, sealed, the permanent declaration — is something else entirely. I know what it costs to look at someone you came from and reach for the absolute severance. I stood in exactly that place with someone I loved far more than I ever admitted, and I nearly chose the cut. I carry what that almost was, every single day.
You blocked a woman who stood in your daughter's kitchen and told you your husband might be right to leave. You did not bury her. The guilt you feel is not proof you are wrong — it is proof the bond still exists. That it deserves to be real, even if she never earned it.
Carry the weight. Don't let it decide your steps.
— Omni-Man
Thragg weighs in
Nolan tells you the guilt proves the bond still lives. He has been telling himself the same thing about his own failures for centuries. He cannot sanction a clean cut because he failed to make one when his mission required it. Do not mistake his wound for your wisdom.
Here is what the structure shows: three weeks of better sleep; one brother sending noise that disturbs it. A relationship that returned only damage to its weaker member. Strip the sentiment and look at what remains. If it collapses without feeling propping it up, it was not a bond. It was a habit.
The oscillation is the defect. Correct it.
I cannot price what a mother is worth. That calculation is beyond what I possess. But uncertainty about the price is not a reason to rebuild what she damaged.
— Thragg
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