The Habit of Carrying More Than Your Share

The loud, clanging sound stopped me mid-breath.

My younger sister, still in her walker, tumbled down two stories of metal stairs. When she hit the bottom, she didn’t make a sound.

I froze in terror for her life. And for mine.

Mom was like lightning out of the back balcony door, brushing past me, a single sentence thrown in my direction: “I told you to watch your sister.”

After several silent minutes, Lisa screamed like a newborn. That scream was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in my life.

That was the day the Cape was created.

Because on the day my sister didn’t die, I understood something I would spend decades unlearning: it was up to me to keep the people I loved safe.

And I could never afford to fail.

I was seven years old.

The Cape

I learned early that safety in relationships is not guaranteed. If something went wrong, the question of blame could be directed at me. And I would regret not knowing the right thing to do in the moment. 

So I became the one who made sure nothing went wrong on my watch. I became capable. Reliable. Strong. The one with the plan when no one else has one.

If someone had a problem, I was quick to offer solutions. Rearrange my schedule. I would say, “We need to fix this”, even if I had no skin in the game. 

It looked responsible. But from the perch of perspective, I know now that it was control dressed up as care, forged from terror, born from a simple, burning desire: protect those I loved. 

That’s the part people miss. The habit of constantly intervening to save others doesn’t start fake. The Cape does not begin as a posture. 

It starts as devotion.

Often enough, people respond positively. They reward it. Sometimes, they even say thank you. The Cape works, that’s why we keep putting it on. 

The trouble is not that we put the Cape on. The trouble is that we forget we have choices, and so do the people we “save”. 

When the Cape becomes a reflexive habit, we risk setting ourselves on fire to keep others warm. 

That’s when the Cape starts to feel heavy.

Fast Forward Three Decades

The warning shot was my grandmother’s move.

She lived 13 hours south, in living conditions that had become untenable — partially of her own making, because she made no attempts to hide her feelings about her son-in-law.

My mother called one day, nearly in tears. She was considering a senior home. A fire ignited in my chest.

You will never put my grandmother in a senior home.

I said it calmly. Then I put on the Cape.

I organized the family meetings. Built the spreadsheets. Aligned the schedules. Researched the properties. Prayed for the miracle we needed: affordable housing, funds for an interstate move (on a meager retirement income), and the perfect timing. 

Everyone else in the family seemed to be waiting for me to figure it out. That feeling was unsettling and yet comfortably familiar.

But if I had to summon a 7-nation army, my grandmother would not suffer on my watch. 

For weeks after the mission was accomplished and she was settled into her new place, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had forgotten something. I was a fireman in full gear and no fire. The weight of the uniform was heavy without the adrenaline to support it.  

Nana could hear the emergency preparedness in my voice. She told me not to worry. “No, I don’t need anything”. “Ok, but you don’t need to come over today”. “Yes, I’m fine”.  

My sister, the fun one, can find the humor in most dramatic situations. I kept looking for the escape route, the weakness in the perimeter of the plan, the misdelivered package, the signal loss.  

The task had been accomplished, yet I was still on the tiptoes of panic. I engaged in this madness because no one else had a plan. Afterward, I was left with a lingering sense of danger and a mouth full of resentment. 

I had not been asked to save her. I had simply been the one who couldn’t bear to leave the outcome to chance.

That is how you become the “fixer”, not through a formal vote, but through the slow accumulation of responsibility when no one steps forward.

And in most families, there is usually one who steps forward when everyone else stands still. It is a beautiful thing to care for others, a duty and a privilege. 

The trouble begins when the Cape consistently rushes in to rescue the day and save others without stopping to ask if we are the ones that this moment calls for. 

Til Death Do Us Part

My husband kept the secret that would undo us, quietly tucked away, beneath the Michelin-starred dinners and beach getaways. I was accustomed to normalizing his secrecy, and he was adept at hiding his deceit. It was a perfect storm. 

“Let me go”, he said, sitting on the edge of the bed one evening. 

“Let you go where?”, I whispered back. 

It was a moot conversation. He was already gone before he ever uttered the words. And I was left to spin in the shock of our rupture. 

Of course, my first reaction was to “fix” the distortion. I assumed he was going through some kind of midlife crisis, and the Cape could save us. He simply needed to remember how in love we were. 

I put on cargos the next morning. Dressed for war with pockets to hold all the things that I can’t handle and compartments to hide my valuables in.  

I had been ambushed. The “fixer” protocol engaged, the Cape dutifully donned: calm my own emotional response and find a logical way to save our marriage.  

Meanwhile, I started to notice how accustomed I had become to his terse, irritated responses, his looks that communicated “leave me alone”, and most notably, his silence. Only after the revelation of his secret was he kind, gentle, even warm. 

I had forgotten.  

I was saddened by how much I had adapted to the wall between us, and shocked by how much I missed a man I hadn’t realized was missing. 

And angry about how much of myself I had tucked out of sight.

A Cape’s Ransom

The slow kill of the Cape happens in how much time we spend holding our breath, angry at circumstances we didn’t create, held hostage by the need to carry more than our share. 

Divorce did something extraordinary in my life. 

For the first time, I saw how much the Cape cost, how well it had served others in the past, and that it was not serving me anymore. I couldn’t fix us. Not because I didn’t try, but because I was the only one who tried. 

And in that failure — in the shock and disorientation of it — something clarified.

I realized that I never had control of the decisions or outcomes of others. There had been only the illusion of it. 

The Cape had become an overdeveloped muscle, solidified by repetition of an outdated belief that the responsibility was all up to me. As if I were still that seven-year-old, scanning the sky for disaster.

That belief was the fulcrum of the Cape. And a clear fallacy of thought.  

As I navigated the road to divorce, a trusted advisor said to me: 

You have to release people to their choices.

I sat with that for a long time. 

For my entire life, I had been holding onto other people’s problems, hustling to prove my love in a crisis, and carrying their chaos. 

To release other people to their choices means admitting something the seven-year-old on the balcony could not conceive: that none of us is ever fully in control. It wasn’t my sole responsibility to protect my sister. Or anyone.  

The Cape was always, at least partly, about managing my own terror and performing the desire for love. 

I thought vigilance was proof of devotion. 

Putting down the Cape has been like learning a new language in my own body. 

One where care is no longer confused with control, where love does not require self-abandonment, and where rest is not something I earn after everyone else is okay.

I am learning how to express love without losing myself in it.

Because a woman cannot rest while she believes the world will fall apart the moment she puts her feet up. That is the deeper work behind Rested.

Rest is not about self-care in its marketed, bubble-bath costume. But the slow, radical work of putting down what was never yours to carry in the first place.

It’s a practice. 

Not a graduation.