I've said "of course" so many times when asked if I'm okay that the answer stopped being a report from the inside and became a gate that kept everyone — including me — from checking what was actually behind it
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She asked while I was putting on my coat. That's what Grace does — slips the real question in between the logistics, the way you'd slide a letter into someone's pocket hoping they'd find it later. Everyone was standing up, clearing wrapping paper, the grandchildren already in the other room testing their new things. The evening was winding down in that particular way Christmas evenings do, where the energy shifts from celebration to the quiet arithmetic of who's driving where.
"Mom, are you doing okay?"
"Of course," I said. One arm in the coat, the other reaching for my scarf. I said it the way I'd say my own name if someone asked — without consultation, without checking, the syllables arriving before the question had fully landed.
She looked at me for a half-second longer than the answer warranted. Then she hugged me and said, "Drive safe." And I drove home through the dark, twenty-two minutes of highway and neighborhood streets, and somewhere around the turn onto my road I realized I had no idea whether what I'd said was true.
Not because I was lying. Because I hadn't checked. The "of course" had become so automatic, so structurally embedded in how I respond to that question, that it no longer required me to consult the actual answer before delivering it. It was a reflex. A sealed envelope I handed out every time someone knocked — here, take this, it says I'm fine, please don't open it, because I'm not entirely sure what's inside anymore either.
The archaeology of "of course"
I've been saying it for so long that I can't locate where it started. But if I dig — and I've been digging since Christmas, in my journal, in my therapist's office, in those 5:30 a.m. hours when the house is quiet enough for honesty — I think it started around the time my first husband left.
I was 28. Two toddlers. No savings. The question came from everyone — my mother, my sisters, my few remaining friends, the other teachers at the school where I was substitute teaching while finishing my degree. "Are you okay?" And the only acceptable answer, the only one that didn't open a door I couldn't afford to walk through, was "of course."
Of course meant: I'm handling it. Of course meant: don't worry about me. Of course meant: I am not going to fall apart in front of you because falling apart takes time I don't have and energy I can't spare and vulnerability I can't risk, because if I let one crack show, the whole structure might come down, and two children are depending on that structure to hold.
It was a survival word. And like all survival mechanisms, it worked beautifully in the crisis and then refused to leave when the crisis was over.
I said "of course" through fifteen years of single motherhood. Through the exhaustion of two jobs. Through the early years of my second marriage, when I was still learning to trust happiness and the question "are you okay?" felt like a trap designed to make me admit I wasn't sure. Through my husband's Parkinson's, when people asked with increasing concern and my "of course" became a performance so polished I could deliver it while crying on the inside and nobody — nobody — could tell.
After he died, the question came more frequently and my answer came faster. Of course. Of course. Of course. A wall built one brick at a time for forty years, so high now that I couldn't see over it to check whether the person behind it was actually fine or had simply stopped reporting.
When you stop checking
That's the part that frightened me on the drive home. Not that I might not be okay — I've been not okay before and I know what that feels like. What frightened me was the realization that I'd stopped asking myself the question. The "of course" had become so efficient, so seamless in its delivery, that it had replaced the internal inquiry altogether.
Somewhere along the way, the answer stopped being a report from the inside and started being a gate that kept people on the outside. And the gate was so well-maintained — oiled, painted, functioning beautifully — that I'd forgotten there was supposed to be someone on the other side of it, checking on the house.
I thought about this in my kitchen that night, sitting with tea in the stove light the way I do when something needs more room than the rest of the house allows. When was the last time I actually checked? Not performed the check — not scanned my life for the visible metrics of okayness (health acceptable, finances stable, family intact, garden tended) — but actually sat with myself and asked, honestly, without an audience, without the reflexive need to produce a reassuring answer: How are you?
I couldn't remember. And the not-remembering felt like finding a room in my house that I hadn't entered in years — dusty, unfamiliar, the air stale from disuse.
What "of course" protects
My therapist has a theory about my "of course," and I hold it loosely because holding things loosely is something she's been teaching me to do for years.
She thinks the "of course" doesn't just protect other people from my struggles. It protects me from knowing about them. That the reflex isn't only outward-facing — a shield I raise when someone asks a caring question. It's inward-facing too. A mechanism that prevents me from sitting with whatever I might find if I actually looked.
Because what if I looked and the answer was no? What if I checked and found that the woman behind the gate was lonely in a way that couldn't be solved by supper clubs and Sunday phone calls? What if she was grieving things she'd never fully grieved — not just her husband, but the years of single motherhood she powered through without processing, the career she loved but that exhausted her in ways she never admitted, the relationship with her own mother that operated on duty rather than intimacy? What if the "of course" was holding back not one feeling but an accumulation of them, decades' worth, pressed together like sediment into something so dense and heavy that moving it would require more courage than she had at 70?
Better to leave the gate closed. Better to say "of course" and keep driving. Better to let the question dissolve into the highway dark and arrive home to a quiet house where no one asks the follow-up.
That's what the reflex is for. Not protection from other people's concern. Protection from my own answers.
The people who stopped asking
Here's the cost I didn't anticipate. When you say "of course" enough times, with enough conviction, people stop asking. Not because they stop caring. Because you've trained them to believe the gate is the whole story. There's nothing behind it. She's fine. She said so. She always says so.
My son doesn't ask anymore. He calls on the designated days, we talk about practical things, and the question "are you okay?" doesn't come up because I eliminated it from our vocabulary years ago. He learned, from watching me, that the question is ceremonial — asked out of politeness, answered with a formula, serving no investigative purpose whatsoever.
My friends ask occasionally, but they ask the way people ask about the weather — a social ritual, not a genuine inquiry. "How are you, Marlene?" "Oh, fine. Good. You know." They do know. They know I'll say that regardless of what's happening behind the gate, and they've accepted that the gate is as far as they'll get.
Grace is the only one who still presses. Who looks at me a half-second longer than the answer warrants. Who asks at Christmas while I'm putting on my coat, as if timing the question for the moment my defenses are occupied with buttons and scarves might give the truth a crack to slip through.
She's been doing this for years. I've been deflecting for years. And the sadness of that — two women who love each other deeply, one reaching and the other reflexively batting the hand away — is something I can only see clearly from the distance of my kitchen at night, when the performance has no audience and the "of course" has no one to convince.
What checking actually looks like
I'm learning. Slowly, with the clumsiness of a woman unlearning a reflex she's practiced longer than some people have been alive.
In the mornings, before the journal, before the tea, before the day assembles its distractions, I sit at my kitchen table and ask myself the question. Not out loud — that feels too strange still. But internally, with the kind of patience I used to bring to a struggling student. How are you today? Not "of course." Not a performance. An actual check.
Some mornings the answer is fine. Genuinely fine. The garden needs tending, there's bread to bake, a book to finish, a call with Carol later. Fine.
Some mornings the answer is more complicated. Lonely, but not in a way I can fix today. Missing my husband in the specific way that hits when the house is cold and the bed is too large. Worried about getting older alone. Sad about something I can't name, the kind of sadness that lives below language and doesn't want to be solved, just acknowledged.
Both of those answers are true. Both of them deserve to exist. The "of course" gave room to only one.
Final thoughts
Grace called last Sunday. Our usual time. At the end, almost as an afterthought but not really, she said, "Mom, how are you? And I mean actually."
The "of course" was right there. Loaded, ready, thumb on the trigger. Forty years of muscle memory telling me to fire.
Instead, I paused. The pause lasted maybe three seconds but felt geological. And I said, "I'm mostly okay. Some days are harder than others. But I'm paying attention."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That's the most honest answer you've ever given me."
She might be right. It might be the most honest answer I've given anyone, including myself, in forty years. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't reassuring in the way she was used to. It didn't close the door. It left it open — just slightly, just enough for air — and the air that came through felt like something I'd been suffocating without for so long that I'd mistaken the suffocation for normal breathing.
I'm mostly okay. Some days are harder than others. I'm paying attention.
It's not "of course." But it's true. And true, I'm learning, is the only answer that actually lets someone in.
