What I Learned About My Family From Running Their Group Chat for Four Years

For four years I was the person who told my family things. If my brother had news, I heard it and passed it on. If an aunt was ill, I found out and told the others. Nobody appointed me and I did not notice it happening, and it ended when I was away for six weeks with poor signal and the family discovered it could not tell itself anything.

The technical term for this in community organising is a hub-and-spoke network, and it is a known failure pattern. Everyone is connected to the centre and nobody is connected to each other. It is efficient right up until the centre is unavailable, and then it turns out that two people who have known each other for forty years have no habit of speaking directly.

The six weeks were revealing. My mother did not learn about my cousin’s job change until I got back. Two of my siblings had a small disagreement that would have taken one conversation and instead sat for a month, because their normal route was through me and I was not there.

What I noticed when I got back, and did not like, is that I had been enjoying it. Not the work — the position. Being the person who knows things is a form of standing, and I had been holding it while also complaining about the effort, which is a fairly common arrangement and not an admirable one.

What I did about it was mostly to stop, and the stopping was uncomfortable and produced a genuine gap for about eight months. Things did not get passed on. Two events were missed. My instinct throughout was that this was harm I was causing by withholding something I was capable of doing, and I had to keep reminding myself that a network that only works because one person carries it is not working.

Direct connections did eventually form, slowly and incompletely. My brother and my mother now speak without me, which they did not before. Two others still do not, and I have accepted that as the actual state of their relationship rather than a problem for me to paper over.

The thing I would say to anyone who recognises themselves as the hub is that the labour is real and worth naming out loud, and that naming it usually produces sympathy and no change. What produced change was availability going down. I do not think that is a coincidence, and I do not think it is a criticism of my family — a system arranges itself around what is available, and while I was available there was no reason for anything else to develop.

The version I would recommend, having done the abrupt one, is a slower withdrawal: stop relaying anything that is not urgent, and specifically stop answering questions about other people with the answer. “You should ask him” is an irritating sentence to say fifteen times and it is the whole mechanism. It took me a while to be able to say it without feeling obstructive, and it does more than any amount of explaining about how tiring the role is.