I'm a good son for exactly forty-eight hours—anything past that, and my body starts looking for the exit, no matter how much I love them
I have a theory about visiting my parents that I've never said out loud, until now.
The theory is this: I am a good son for approximately forty-eight hours. Anything past that, and something in my body that I cannot seem to override starts looking for the exit.
Two nights, I'm at my best. I'm patient. I'm engaged. I help with the dishes without being asked. I laugh at my dad's jokes the way I did when I was eleven. I ask my mum about her friends by name. I am, by any reasonable measure, the kind of son they raised me to be, and I'm doing it well.
By the third night, something shifts. I'm still being polite. I'm still helping. But there's a low static under everything now, a tightness in my shoulders I didn't notice arriving. I find myself volunteering to go to the shops alone. I take longer in the shower than I need to. I look at flights, casually, the way other men look at car listings or fishing rods.
By the fourth night, if I'm still there, I'm not actually present anymore. I'm a man performing presence while, internally, counting hours.
I love my parents. I want to keep saying this, because the thing I'm describing is one of the most loving and least admitted-to facts of my adult life. There is nothing wrong between us. They're not difficult. They're not toxic. They're not any of the things people on the internet use to explain why grown children flee their childhood homes.
The problem is something simpler and stranger. Being a good son for forty years takes a posture, and the body eventually refuses to hold it.
The posture
I want to describe the posture, because I think most people who do it don't quite see what they're doing until they see it written down.
Being a good son, in my house, in most of the houses I know, involves a particular configuration of self. You are slightly more cheerful than you actually feel. You are slightly more agreeable than you actually are. You are interested in topics you wouldn't otherwise be interested in. You laugh at jokes you've heard before, and you laugh as if you haven't. You don't bring up subjects that will land badly. You don't correct things that aren't worth correcting. You modulate your voice into a register that's slightly warmer, slightly higher, slightly more accommodating than the one you use at work or with your friends.
None of this is fake, exactly. I genuinely am cheerful around my parents. I genuinely do enjoy the dad jokes. The warmth is real warmth.
It's just that all of it requires a small, sustained effort that I don't have to make in any other room of my life. The effort isn't visible. It doesn't feel like effort, in the moment. It feels like love. Which it is. But it's a particular kind of love that costs something to produce, and the body, over time, keeps the receipts.
By night three, the bill comes due. By night four, the body sends it to collections.
Why this isn't a complaint about my parents
I want to be very clear, because the internet has trained us to read any difficulty with parents as evidence that the parents are the problem.
My parents are not the problem. My parents are, in fact, lovely. They've earned the visits. They deserve them. The two-night limit is not a verdict on them. It's a feature of the role I was assigned and have been playing, with full sincerity, since I was about four years old.
Children, in most families, are given a part. The part isn't always articulated, but it's there—shaped by what got rewarded and what got ignored, by what made the parents' eyes light up and what made them go quiet. By the time I was a teenager, I knew my part very well. I was the easygoing one. The one who didn't make a fuss. The one who could be relied on to keep things light when things were heavy. The one who, when his parents were stressed, became more accommodating rather than less.
This wasn't a bad part to be given. There are worse parts. But it was a part, and parts have to be played, and forty years is a very long time to play any part without breaks.
When I visit my parents, I slip back into the role almost involuntarily. I don't even notice I'm doing it. The role is, by now, basically autonomic—my body knows how to be the easygoing son the way it knows how to ride a bike. I don't choose it. It just happens, the moment I cross the threshold.
And the role is sustainable for about two days. Then it isn't.
What the body actually does
I've been paying attention to this, lately, the way you pay attention to a recurring back pain to see if you can figure out what's setting it off.
The two-night thing isn't really about the third day. It's about the cumulative effect of being on. Every conversation, even a pleasant one, takes a small amount of energy that I don't have to spend in my own house. Every meal involves a small amount of editing—what to mention, what to skip, how to frame the week, which version of my life to present. Every joke from my father gets a real laugh, but the laugh is produced rather than triggered. The difference is microscopic. The difference, multiplied across forty-eight hours, is enormous.
By the third day, my reservoir is empty. I haven't had a meaningful chunk of time alone since I arrived. I haven't been the version of myself that no one is watching. I've been on stage, lovingly, for the entire run, and the run has been longer than my body is built for.
What looks, from the outside, like restlessness or irritation is actually just depletion. I'm not annoyed at my parents. I'm running low on the very specific kind of energy required to be the son they recognize, and I haven't had any way to refuel.
The fix, I've started to realize, isn't to stop visiting. It isn't to stop loving them. It's to stop pretending the depletion isn't real.
What's actually changed for me
A few things, in the last couple of years, have shifted the math.
The first is that I've stopped staying as long as I think I should. For most of my thirties, I was visiting for a week at a time, because a week felt like the right length of visit for a son who lives abroad and doesn't get home often. A week was, in practice, three nights of being present and four nights of being a ghost in my own childhood bedroom. I was giving them the version of me that, by night five, wasn't really me anyway. Now I visit more often, for shorter stretches. Two nights. Sometimes three. I leave while we're still genuinely enjoying each other.
The second thing is that I've stopped pretending the visits don't tire me out. I take afternoon walks alone. I retreat to the spare room for an hour with a book and don't apologize for it. I tell my mother, plainly, that I need a quiet morning. She is, to her credit, mostly fine with this. The thing I was protecting her from by performing endurance was, it turns out, not something she needed protecting from. She'd have preferred a shorter visit with a present son to a long visit with a depleted one.
The third thing—and this is the one I'm still working on—is that I've started, very tentatively, breaking the role in small ways while I'm there. Not in big confrontations. Just in small refusals to play the part on autopilot. Disagreeing about something I'd normally let slide. Saying I don't feel like talking about a subject. Sitting in a silence rather than filling it with the cheerful patter that my forty-year contract requires.
Each of these small refusals feels, internally, like a tiny earthquake. None of them have caused any actual damage. My parents have absorbed them, mostly without comment. The world has not ended. The role is loosening, by millimeters.
If this is you
You are not a bad son or daughter for having a two-night limit. You are not failing at family. You are not, in any of the ways that get diagnosed online, dealing with toxic parents. You are, much more probably, dealing with the simple physiological cost of having played a part for four decades without an intermission.
The cost is real. The cost is not a moral failure. The body keeps a tab on this kind of thing whether you want it to or not, and the tab will, eventually, present itself, usually around 9 p.m. on day three, in the form of a sudden urgent need to be anywhere else.
You can listen to that. You don't have to fight it. You can plan visits around it. You can shorten them. You can, gently, start to break the role in small enough ways that nobody notices except you, until eventually you've built a slightly different version of being your parents' child—one that costs you less to maintain, and gives them, in the end, more of you.
The two-night version of me is a much better son than the seven-night version. The seven-night version is a man counting hours. The two-night version is genuinely glad to be there.
I'd rather give my parents the genuine one. Even if it means leaving sooner. Even if it means more visits. Even if it means, occasionally, sitting on a plane back to Bangkok and feeling, with some surprise, that I miss them.
That's the version I want them to remember. That's the one I can actually hold.
