The presence mismatch: busy when they’re free

When I was small, my mother was busy. She was funding her own education, then slogging through a teaching career that ended with her as a school headmistress. The day-to-day of raising me fell to my grandmother — the one who couldn’t read but ran a cow-milk business with more nerve than most MBAs I’ve met since.

I didn’t resent it. I barely noticed it. That was just the shape of the house.

Then the timeline did something cruel. My mother retired. Suddenly she had time — long, open afternoons, the phone within reach, a willingness to talk about nothing for an hour. And by then I was the busy one. Chennai, then the jobs, then the products, then the meetings that bled into more meetings. She had the time and I didn’t. I had wanted her, once, in a way I couldn’t name; now she wanted me, and I was always just finishing one thing.

That’s the mismatch I keep coming back to. We are almost never free at the same time as the people who love us.

The supply and demand of love

I’ve come to think of presence the way I think of a market. There’s a supply side and a demand side, and the tragedy is that they rarely clear.

When you’re a child, demand for your parent’s attention is at its peak and the supply is throttled by work, money, survival. When you’re grown, the supply finally opens up — the parent retires, slows down, has nothing they’d rather do than hear your voice — and now your demand has collapsed under the weight of your own life. Two curves that should have met, sliding past each other for thirty years.

We assume our parents will always be there for us. So we treat presence as something we can buy later, at a better price. The market doesn’t work that way.

The same imbalance shows up everywhere in a family. A newborn is pure demand and you are pure supply, drained to the bone. A teenager wants you gone right when you most want to hold on. The supply and demand of support are almost never in balance — and most of the pain in family life lives in that gap.

Why we get the timing so wrong

Here’s the part I’m least proud of. I had filed my mother under a role. Provider. The one who handles things. The strong one who funded her own degree. Once you attach a person to a mental structure like that, you stop seeing them. You miss the hobbies, the small jokes, the version of them that exists outside the function they perform for you.

A retired parent with open time isn’t just “available.” She’s a different person than the one who raised you — slower, more reflective, finally off the clock. But I was still relating to the old structure: the busy woman who didn’t need me to call. So I didn’t.

It took her illness to break the structure. My mother went in for brain tumour surgery and didn’t come home — four months in a hospital bed, and then post-surgery complications took her. Nothing rearranges your sense of who-owes-what to whom like sitting in a hospital corridor doing the math on every afternoon you let go to voicemail.

Presence has terrible UX, and that’s the whole trap

I write a lot about the spine of everything I do — the slow move from effort to effortless. A behaviour only sticks once it costs less than the thing it replaces; until then you drift back to whatever the default already does for free.

Calling your mother loses that contest every single time, in the moment. The work thing in front of you has perfect UX — it’s urgent, it pings, it gives you a clean hit of done when you close the tab. The call to your parent has terrible UX: no deadline, no notification, no scoreboard, and the payoff is invisible and slow. So the rational, exhausted version of you keeps choosing the tab. And then you mistake a thousand small defaults for “we just weren’t that close.”

You weren’t choosing distance. You were choosing the option with the better interface. The cruelty is that the bad-UX option — the unhurried call, the visit with no agenda — was the only one that was ever going to matter.

So the fix isn’t try to love them more. You don’t lack love. You lack design. You have to make presence the easy default — lower its cost until it stops needing willpower — before the window closes:

1. Give it a slot, not a someday. “I’ll call when things calm down” is a someday, and someday has no UX at all. A standing 8 p.m. Sunday call has a slot. Slots beat intentions every time.
2. Cut the steps between you and them. A recurring calendar block. Their face pinned to the top of your favourites. A flight booked now for the festival, not negotiated against work later. Every step you remove is friction you won’t have to fight when you’re tired.
3. Make the payoff visible. The reward for calling is real but it hides. So pull it forward — notice out loud how a small story from them stays with you all week. A reward you can feel is a reward you’ll come back for.

The window doesn’t reopen

The honest, uncomfortable truth: the supply curve doesn’t stay open. A retired parent with time is on a clock you can’t see. Life expectancy in India has climbed from around 32 years at Independence to roughly 70 now — we get more years with our parents than any generation before us, and we somehow spend them feeling too busy to use them.

I can’t have those afternoons back. What I can do is refuse to repeat the mismatch with the people whose demand for me is peaking right now — my own kids, who want me today, not in the open calendar I imagine I’ll have when they’re grown and gone. By then the curves will have crossed again.

If your parents are alive and have time, you are holding the rarest thing in this market: a moment when supply and demand could actually clear. You will not get a notification when it closes. There is no someday. There is only the next unhurried, badly-designed, completely irreplaceable call — the one you make before you’ve finished the thing in front of you.