Translating For My Parents Since I Was Eleven

She was eleven the first time, in a bank, with a form.

She remembers the counter being at chin height. She remembers a woman behind the glass being kind and slow and speaking to her mother while looking at her, which is a specific thing that happens and which she has now had done to her about four hundred times.

She got the form filled in. She got it wrong in one place and it was fine.

She is forty one now. Since that day she has done: two mortgages, a dispute with a utility company that lasted nine months, every hospital appointment either parent has had, her father's diagnosis, and the conversation last spring where a very tired doctor explained something to her and she then had to turn round in a small room and explain it to two people who love her, in a language she was not educated in, with her own face doing something she had no control over.

Nobody has ever asked her whether she minded.

That is the sentence. Not whether she resents it, because she does not. Whether she minded. In thirty years, from anybody, including from herself.

You know this. Maybe you were not the translator. But something landed on you when you were far too young for it, and it never got renegotiated, because there was never a moment where somebody said this is a lot for a child.

Say what thirty years took, and say it before anything else

Nobody has counted it, so let us.

It took her eleventh year, in the small sense that a child who is competent at a counter stops being treated as a child in that family, and there is no way back from that.

It took her twenties, in the sense that she chose a job and a city with appointments in mind.

And it took the spring, when she had to be the voice that told her own parents about her father. That is not translation. There is no word for that, and there is no training for it, and she did it in a room with a box of tissues on a low table and then drove them home and made lunch.

You were handed something at eleven that no eleven year old should be handed, and God has never once put that on you. Isaiah 46:3 says you have been borne by Him from the belly and carried from the womb, and His Spirit is the one who takes borne off a page and puts it under a child at a counter at chin height. Somebody has been carrying the carrier since the bank.

Even to your old age, and the verb never changes

There is one line built for a woman who has been load bearing since she was eleven.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count the verbs. Made, bear, carry, deliver. Four, and every one of them belongs to God, and the sentence is aimed at a person who is being addressed from the womb through to old age with no gap in the middle where they were expected to manage on their own.

Which means the eleven year old at the counter was already being carried while she was doing the carrying, and the same Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a bank in a particular town rather than a general statement about providence.

You were carried at eleven while you were being the one who carried, and both of those were true at the same time. That is not a soft reading of a strong verse. The written word gives four verbs to God and none to the person, and the Spirit is the one who has been under a woman since a form she filled in wrong in one place.

And let me be plain, because otherwise this becomes another job. Rest here is not a discipline you are behind on. I am not telling you to stop translating, I am not asking you to have a conversation with your mother, and neither of your parents has been let down by a daughter who is tired.

Putting one thing down is not putting them down

The fear here is exact and it is not selfishness.

It is that there is nobody else. That is not a feeling, it is a fact about that family: nobody else can do the language and the paperwork at the same time, and any hour she is not available is an hour two people in their seventies are genuinely on their own with a system that does not care about them.

You are not the only provision for your parents, and one hour set down is not a decision about them. Psalm 121:4 says He who keeps Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes keeps a live verb over two people in their seventies rather than a nice line about God.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the spring is sitting heavier than you have told anybody, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you call your parents. That is not abandoning them. That is the shepherding, arriving through people with hands and telephone numbers, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.