I’ve been watching the tv show Nashville, and there are scenes between Juliette Barnes and her mother that are unexpectedly hard for me to watch.
Juliette’s mom is an addict. There are moments when her mother needs something—food, money, a place to land, someone to rescue her—and Juliette has to turn her away.
Watching it, I know how easy it would be to think, How can you do that? That’s your mom. She’s hungry. She needs you. Just help her.
But I also know something that perhaps you only really understand when you’ve loved someone through addiction:
Sometimes giving in is the easier thing to do.
Saying yes can immediately quiet the guilt. You can fix the problem, pay the bill, pick up the pieces. For a moment, everyone feels better.
But sometimes that “help” is exactly what allows the cycle to continue.
My dad was an alcoholic for most of my childhood. He got sober my senior year of high school, and I am genuinely grateful that he did. But sobriety didn’t magically undo everything else.
The drinking stopped. The meanness didn’t.
And neither did some of the roles the rest of us had learned to play around him.
Years later, in 2023, my mom served him divorce papers. About two months afterward, something became painfully clear to me: without my mom there to manage his life, he was beginning to look to me to fill pieces of the role she had occupied.
Cooking. Finances. Household responsibilities. General life management. Emotional support.
Little by little, I felt myself being pulled toward becoming something a daughter should never have to become: a surrogate spouse.
And I couldn’t do it anymore.
In July 2023, I cut contact with my dad.
There are sentences that look incredibly simple when you type them.
That is one of them.
Because setting a boundary with someone you love isn’t the same thing as suddenly not loving them.
It would be easier if anger erased love. If disappointment erased memories. If recognizing an unhealthy relationship somehow shut off the part of you that still worries about whether that person is okay.
But it doesn’t.
That’s what watching Nashville has brought back for me.
When Juliette turns her mother away, the difficult part isn’t that she doesn’t care.
The difficult part is that she does.
There is a particular kind of grief in realizing that loving someone does not give you the power to make them healthy. And there is another kind of grief in realizing that the ways you’ve been “helping” might actually be helping them avoid having to change.
For a long time, I think I confused love with responsibility.
I’ve learned there is a difference between supporting someone and functioning for them. There is a difference between compassion and enabling. There is a difference between loving someone and sacrificing yourself so they never have to experience the consequences of their own choices.
And boundaries don’t always feel empowering when you’re actually living them.
Sometimes they feel awful.
Sometimes staying strong means sitting with guilt when giving in could make it disappear instantly. Sometimes it means knowing someone you love is angry with you and resisting the urge to fix their perception of you.
And sometimes it means grieving someone who is still alive.
That’s the part I don’t think we talk about enough.
Estrangement isn’t always born from hatred.
Sometimes it is born from years of love, attempts, forgiveness, hope, responsibility, disappointment, and finally the realization that continuing the relationship in its current form requires you to abandon yourself.
I didn’t cut my dad off because I stopped loving him.
I stopped participating because I finally understood that loving him and taking responsibility for his life were two completely different things.
And maybe that’s why those scenes in Nashville hit me differently.
From the outside, the person closing the door can look like the strong one.
But sometimes they’re standing on the other side of that door wanting desperately to open it.
And choosing not to anyway.
Because sometimes the hardest expression of love isn’t rescuing someone.
It’s accepting that you cannot rescue them—and refusing to lose yourself trying
