Adult children who feel almost nothing on routine calls with a parent — not love, not irritation, not connection, just dutiful neutrality — aren’t emotionally numb, they’re correctly registering that the relationship was never quite built, and the absence of feeling is the body’s honest report on a closeness that was assigned rather than developed
The parent is talking. Something about a neighbor, or the weather, or a doctor’s appointment that went fine. The adult child, on the other end of the line, is making the appropriate sounds at the appropriate intervals. *Mm. Right. Oh, that’s good.* The voice on the other end keep…