It's probably fine

I worry so my husband can be the calm one, and vice versa

A few years ago I encountered the idea of the clueless traveler. (Was it in an article? A podcast? A post? A reel? I feel like we don’t talk enough about our waning ability to retain sourcing, but that’s another post.)

I did try to search-engine it in order to give proper credit, and let me say, the travel agents are on point with their SEO, so I’ll have to just tell you. The premise is this: Most people are capable of being either a competent or clueless traveller, and which you are depends on who you’re traveling with.

I’ve experienced this myself, spacing out in the back of a cab near the Turkish-Cypriot border while my German photog buddy directed the driver from the passenger seat. Reading every street sign a week later as I explored a small Greek island with my amiable boyfriend who was happy never knowing where we were.

Some people in our lives will always be our competent traveler. It can be nice to sit back while they take the wheel. Besides, it really sucks to fight over who’s driving, so why bother?

Likewise, there are people who always take the sidecar, which means you start tracking the keys and keeping the gas tank topped off.

I’m a very different person in my family of origin than I am with my college buddies and with my own children. In my first few years of college I found this disorienting, morphing regularly from child to adult in the space of the 3-hour train ride between Seattle and Portland.

It’s kind of a mind-blowing concept that so much of who we are is situational, whether that’s our birth order, our freshman dorm roommate, or who we marry — and how we grow up together in that hopefully symbiotic coupling, and raise our children.

Most of us play lots of roles. If you smash together all of these roles, you get some sense of who you are, but an even fuller picture of what other people have needed from you.

I feel like this is never more true than in parenthood, when all of your preconceptions about what kind of parent you’ll be shatter in the face of who your child actually is. Ha! Talk about humbling.

When my friends and I get together for long walks, we talk about our children by way of exploring our worries for them. Our husbands do not do this. I’m not saying they love their children less, or even talk about them less. But when they talk about our kids it’s usually through funny anecdotes, cool things they’ve done, or even confusion or irritation. Worries come up less often.

It’s hard to separate the roles we might have played if society hadn’t conditioned us to act in a certain way, if most women weren’t forced to get advanced degrees in emotional labor, and most men weren’t drafted into the army of suck it up.

Regardless of gender roles and heteronormativity, there are always designated worriers in relationships — freeing their partners to be the calm ones.

The thing is, if you know someone else is holding all of the worry — always tracking, hyper-vigilant, the progress of your fragile children through this wild world — you can let go of some of your own anxiety. They’ve got this.

Conversely, if you know your partner is capable of snoring while a baby screams bloody murder two feet away, you learn to sleep lighter. Which only years later do you realize you can’t unlearn. Ever. Sigh.

Original artwork by my kid Ruby Gamache-Lininger, about whom I worry

I bring up multiple worries to my husband every week (okay, day) and wait like Pavlov’s wife for his predictable response to calm me.

“It’s probably fine.”

We joke that he should have this printed onto a T-shirt to save him time.

If he doesn’t respond with the magic words, and he too is worried, it’s usually full-steam ahead, code-purple parental panic. We. Are. Freaking. OUT!

But sometimes his shared concern allows me to take a step back from my own worry, and step into a role where I reassure him. The kids are okay. We just love them so much it burns our bare skin like molten lava, that’s all.

We are not islands in our relationships. We exist in the shadowlands of one another. My worry is your calm, reflected back to me.