There are certain situations in which my body is already bracing before I’ve made sense of them. A message arrives, the phone rings or someone asks a simple question, and my jaw tightens. My shoulders lift. I hold my breath.
They usually aren’t crises, but instead, they’re ordinary moments so small that even noticing my reaction can feel excessive. Yet, my reactions are immediate and real, and they linger long enough after the situation has passed that I can’t quite dismiss them. I’ve always wondered why.
The answer began to take shape one morning while I was getting my children ready for school. I stood in the bathroom doorway, waiting for Tim and Ivy to come for their allergy nasal spray. They didn’t come.
Usually, I’d call them again. Then calling would become yelling, and yelling would turn the whole thing into a bad morning. But that morning, I didn’t yell. I waited.
Good intentions gone awry
A few days earlier, my mother-in-law had shown up unannounced with bags of groceries. She arrived with her arms full and moved directly into the kitchen, unloading everything onto the counter. Prices were rising, she said. Better to buy now than later. And with that, she was gone.
The frozen food was already softening. Packages were beginning to leak. The meat needed to be cut into smaller portions before going into the freezer. Amid the melting bags, I also found shrimp that needed to be rinsed and deveined. My mother-in-law had good intentions, but she’d also left me with an urgency I hadn’t planned for.
I’d just finished teaching a two-hour online class. I wanted to make coffee and stare at nothing for a while. Instead, I was irritated by the food clutter in front of me, covering what had been a clean counter just a few seconds earlier.
Surely, the reasonable response would be to shrug and say, “Well, that’s just life.” Put the groceries away and move on. That would be what an easygoing person would do. She’d dismiss the inconvenience, appreciate the gesture and not turn a bag of shrimp into a larger question about her life. While considering this, my irritation quickly turned into shame.
But I also knew that I didn’t react this way to every unexpected change. Whatever my body was reacting to, it wasn’t change itself. Then I began noticing the same feeling elsewhere.
Suggestions that become obligations
One evening, someone mentioned a newly opened restaurant that was difficult to book. Almost immediately, everyone was checking reservation times, discussing queues and deciding who could arrive early to wait. Suddenly, dinner had become a logistical operation. Before I knew it, we were sitting separately at the back of the restaurant beside the washroom, waiting for food to arrive.
Whether the food was good, or worth all that effort, was beside the point. What interested me was how quickly a suggestion had become an obligation.
When something was mentioned, you were to begin dealing with it. A question could become a task before you’d even decided whether it needed to. But it wasn’t just about getting things done. Responding quickly meant you cared. Hesitating could look like inattentiveness.
Responding quickly meant you cared. Hesitating could look like inattentiveness.
A good daughter, a dependable partner and an accommodating person didn’t wait, because delay seemed to carry a moral meaning. It risked making you look unaccommodating, uncaring or ungrateful.
It was an unspoken contract, one I’d never quite agreed to sign. And that was what my body had been reacting to. Not change. Not inconvenience. Not even the shrimp. It was the feeling that someone else’s urgency could become my responsibility before I’d decided whether it belonged to me at all.
This made sense when I considered where it came from. My husband and I both grew up in families in which quick responsiveness carried meaning. Being available without hesitation showed attentiveness, consideration and commitment to the people around you.
Even now, when our parents are often simply checking in rather than asking for anything immediate, I can feel myself preparing to respond. I know there is no emergency, no demand, no need to act right away. My body remembers otherwise.
Stopping pressure before it sets in
While standing in the bathroom doorway that morning, I realized I was teaching the same reflex to my children. If I yelled, my urgency would dictate the morning. Their natural rhythm would begin to feel like something they were getting wrong.
But they weren’t wrong. We weren’t late. Nothing needed to be rushed. So I took my hands off my hips and waited. Less than a minute later, both children came into the bathroom, smiling. I gave them their nasal spray, and the morning continued without friction.
Urgency doesn’t only shape the person feeling it. It can be handed across a relationship. There will still be school mornings, appointments and moments when speed is necessary. I’ll still ask them to hurry sometimes. But I don’t want urgency to become the atmosphere of our relationship.
I want them to know that being called doesn’t always mean responding immediately. That another person’s impatience doesn’t automatically belong to them. That being caring doesn’t require living according to everyone else’s timing.
I’m still learning this myself. My jaw still tightens. My shoulders still rise. But now, sometimes, I notice the pressure before I act on it. That morning in the doorway, I felt the urgency and didn’t pass it on.
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