I want to write about a particular feeling I have on the drive back to the airport after I’ve spent a few days at my parents’ house in London.
The feeling arrives, reliably, somewhere around the M25. I’ll be in the back of an Uber. I’ll have said my goodbyes to my mother and father. I’ll have hugged the dog they look after for me when I’m not there. I’ll have done the small, ceremonial five-extra-seconds-at-the-curb that I’ve written about elsewhere. The visit, by every external measure, will have gone well.
And somewhere on the M25, a small panicked feeling will start in my chest. It’s not large. It’s not, in any visible sense, a problem. It’s just a particular tightness, accompanied by a particular kind of mental restlessness, and an inexplicable urgency to be back in Bangkok in my own apartment with my own dogs and my own routines as quickly as possible.
For a long time, I assumed this feeling was guilt. The cultural script around visits to one’s parents suggests that the appropriate emotion on the drive home should be a small sweet sadness. You’ve left. They’re getting older. The visits are finite. Some part of you should, in the standard script, be wishing you’d stayed an extra day.
What I feel, instead, is the opposite. I feel a sharp, slightly desperate need to leave faster. I feel a strange agitation that doesn’t match the warmth of the visit I’ve just had. I feel like a man who has just been let out of a place he was, on some level he wasn’t quite tracking, very keen to leave.
It took me a long time to understand what this feeling actually was. When I figured it out, I want to say, it was a relief. The feeling stopped, on the drive home, being something I had to feel guilty about. It became, instead, useful information about a piece of internal architecture I had not, until then, fully understood.
The feeling isn’t disloyalty
I want to say plainly what the feeling is not, because for years I tried to interpret it through frames that didn’t fit.
It is not disloyalty. I love my parents. I am glad to see them. I am not, in any sense I can detect, secretly trying to escape from them. The visits are warm. The visits, in many ways, work.
It is not regret. I do not, on the drive home, wish I had visited less. I am glad I came. I would do the visit again next month if my schedule allowed.
It is not relief that the visit is over, exactly, in the way relief works after a difficult social obligation. The visit was not difficult. The visit was, by every reasonable measure, fine.
What it is, I have come to believe, is something more specific than any of those things. It is my nervous system being asked, for a period of seventy-two hours, to perform a job description that I have spent the last decade and a half formally retiring from. The job description is the role I had in my parents’ house when I was a teenager. The role hasn’t been needed for twenty years. The room I performed it in still triggers the wiring required to perform it. By the time I leave, my body has been quietly running the old protocol for three days, and the small panicked feeling on the M25 is the protocol shutting down.
The shutting down feels like panic because the body has been on alert for the entire visit without knowing it has been on alert. The drive home is the first moment the body realizes it’s allowed to stand down. The standing down comes with a small adrenal flush. The flush is the panic. The panic is, structurally, the end of the alert rather than the beginning of one.
The job description I retired from
I want to describe what the old job description was, because the description is the thing that makes the M25 feeling make sense.
The job description, when I was fourteen, included a particular kind of vigilance. I was the older child of two working parents, and the texture of our household required a certain amount of low-grade emotional management from me. I was responsible for monitoring the temperature of the kitchen. I was responsible for managing my own emotional output to fit whatever mood my parents had brought home from work. I was responsible for the small ongoing labor of being the easy son who didn’t add to whatever was already going on.
This was not, I want to stress, an unusual job description. Most teenagers in most families have some version of it. It was not abuse. It was not even, by the standards of the time, particularly demanding. It was just a quiet, ongoing, low-volume protocol that I ran more or less continuously throughout my adolescence.
I left home at eighteen. I built, in the next twenty years, a different version of myself. The version of me that lives in Bangkok is not the version of me that lived in that kitchen at fourteen. I am, in my actual current life, much less vigilant. I am much less calibrated for the moods of others. I am, in some real way, a more relaxed and less monitoring person than the boy who used to live at that address.
What I have not been able to do, despite twenty years of work, is fully retire the original protocol from the original location. When I walk back into my parents’ house, the protocol activates. It activates regardless of my conscious intention. It activates regardless of how warm the visit is. It activates because the room itself, the configuration of the kitchen, the sound of my parents’ voices, the texture of the daily rhythms of that household, are the conditions under which the protocol was originally installed. The conditions still produce the response. The response is automatic.
So I spend three days in my parents’ house running, on autopilot, a slightly more vigilant version of myself than the one I’ve been operating as in Bangkok. The vigilance is not visible. I’m not, in any external sense, performing differently. I’m laughing at the right things. I’m asking the right questions. I’m doing the things a thirty-eight-year-old visiting son does. Underneath that, my nervous system is running the old protocol, scanning the kitchen for moods, calibrating my output, doing the small low-grade work of being the easy son. The work is invisible. The work is also, after seventy-two hours, exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with how warm the visit has been.
The drive home is when the protocol turns off. The turning off feels like a small panic because the body has been holding a configuration for three days that it didn’t know it was holding. The release of the configuration produces the strange agitation I feel on the M25. It is not, as I used to think, a sign of disloyalty. It is a sign of a nervous system relaxing out of a job it didn’t formally agree to take on for the duration of the visit.
Why this is so hard to describe
I want to think about why this kind of feeling is so hard to articulate, even to oneself, because I think the inarticulability is the central problem.
The feeling is hard to describe because it doesn’t match the cultural script. The cultural script around adult children visiting their parents allows for a few sanctioned emotions. Warmth. Mild irritation. Sweet sadness on the drive home. Maybe, if the visit was difficult, frustration or relief. The feeling I’m describing is none of these. It is closer to the feeling of taking off a costume after a long day in it. The costume was not the problem. The wearing of the costume was, however, real labor, and the removal is its own kind of physical event.
The feeling is also hard to describe because it makes you sound like a difficult son. To say “the visit was warm and I’m glad I came and also I have a small panicked feeling on the way home that has nothing to do with anything my parents did” is to introduce a level of psychological nuance that most family conversations don’t have room for. The simple version is preferable. The simple version is “the visit was lovely.” The complicated version is the truth, and the truth makes you sound, in any room you might say it in, like the kind of person who overcomplicates things.
So most adult children who feel what I’m describing don’t say it. They feel the feeling on the drive home. They notice it. They put it away. They report, to anyone who asks, that the visit was lovely. The feeling becomes a small private weather pattern that they live with, alone, indefinitely.
This is, I think, a missed opportunity. The feeling is useful information. The feeling is telling you something specific about the relationship between your current self and the room you grew up in. The feeling is telling you that some part of you is still, despite all your conscious work, calibrated for an old job. The information matters, because the information is the thing that lets you stop interpreting the feeling as guilt or disloyalty and start interpreting it as data.
What I started doing differently
I want to describe what I’ve started doing on visits to my parents, because the small adjustment has, in the last year or so, made the M25 feeling considerably less intense.
The first thing was that I stopped trying to suppress the protocol while I was inside the house. For years, I had been trying, when I noticed the old vigilance kicking in, to consciously override it. The override didn’t work. It just added a second layer of effort on top of the first one. I was running the protocol, plus running the override, plus performing the version of myself that was supposed to be running neither. The total cognitive load was, by the third day, considerable.
What I started doing instead was just letting the protocol run, while quietly noticing it. I’d notice myself scanning the kitchen for moods. I’d notice myself calibrating my output. I’d notice the old habits of vigilance kicking in. Instead of fighting them, I’d just acknowledge, internally, that they were happening. The acknowledgment didn’t stop the protocol. It did, somehow, reduce the cognitive overhead of running it. The protocol got quieter when it was witnessed rather than fought.
The second thing was that I started taking small breaks during the visit. A long walk. A morning at a coffee shop. A few hours where I was, physically, not in the house. These breaks allowed the protocol to partially shut down before the drive home, which meant the shutdown on the M25 was less dramatic. The body, having had a few rest periods over the course of the visit, did not need to do the entire decompression in one Uber ride.
The third thing, and this is the most important, was simply being honest with myself about what was happening. The drive home no longer feels like a moral failing to me. It feels like information. The information is that I am still, after twenty years, the slightly vigilant teenage version of myself when I’m in that house, and that the vigilance has a cost, and that the M25 feeling is the cost being paid. The information does not change the visit. The information does, however, change my relationship to the feeling. The feeling stopped being a problem to solve. The feeling became, instead, a small ongoing fact about how my nervous system is built.
What I’d say to anyone who recognizes this
If you have ever felt, on the drive home from your parents’ house, a small panicked feeling that doesn’t match how warm the visit was, I want you to know that you are not a bad child. You are not failing at family. You are not, in the language we usually use for these things, secretly resentful of your parents.
You are, much more probably, a person whose nervous system was calibrated, in childhood, for a job that the room you grew up in still triggers. You retired from that job. The wiring did not retire with you. Every time you go back, the wiring activates. Every time you leave, the wiring deactivates. The deactivation is the small panicked feeling. It is, structurally, the body releasing a configuration it has been holding for the duration of the visit.
This is not something you can fully fix. The wiring is the wiring. What you can do, with the wiring, is stop interpreting the M25 feeling as a moral failing. The feeling is not a verdict on your love for your parents. The feeling is a fact about how childhood roles persist in adult bodies. The feeling is allowed to exist.
It is, in fact, almost certainly a sign that you have, in your adult life, built a different version of yourself than the one that lived in that house. The drive home is your nervous system shifting back from the old version to the new one. The shift takes a moment. The moment feels like panic because the shift is real and physical. The panic, unlike the version that comes from actual danger, does not require any action. It just requires the time it takes to drive to the airport.
I had this feeling, last month, on the way to Heathrow. I let it run. I noticed it. I did not, this time, try to interpret it as guilt. By the time I was in the departure lounge, the feeling had passed. The visit, in retrospect, had been lovely. The feeling on the M25 had also been real. Both things were true. I no longer need to choose between them.
The drive home is the drive home. The feeling is the feeling. Neither is a moral verdict on your relationship with your parents. Both are useful information about how a person who grew up in one room is now, in middle age, slowly learning to be a different person in a different room. The slow learning is the work. The work is, I want to suggest, going better than you think it is. The drive home is, in some real way, the proof.
