This story began with Mother’s Day and the uncomfortable truth that love inside families is not always soft, nurturing, or easy to carry.
I wanted to write about the kind of relationship that survives more through endurance than affection — the kind built from obligation, history, guilt, survival, and the stubborn gravity of blood ties. Not every mother and daughter move through life wrapped in warmth and understanding. Sometimes they circle one another like wounded planets, bound together by forces neither fully trusts nor entirely escapes.
The white carnations became important to me very early while writing this story. In many families, flowers are symbols of love or apology, but here they became something heavier: ritual, endurance, and acknowledgment. White flowers for the dead. White flowers for silence. White flowers for the things people continue carrying long after forgiveness has become too complicated to name aloud.
Chicago itself also became part of the emotional architecture of the story. I wanted the city to feel damaged, cold, immense, and hungry — a place where grief could disappear into fog, traffic, river water, paperwork, and noise without ever truly being resolved. The river especially haunted me while writing. Cities often absorb suffering so completely that tragedy begins to feel procedural, and I wanted Steve’s death to carry that terrible sense of institutional indifference: a human life quietly flattened into forms, liability language, and avoidable neglect.
But beneath all of that, this story became deeply personal in another way. I was interested in the emotional inheritance families pass down without meaning to: hunger mistaken for strength, loneliness mistaken for resilience, obligation mistaken for love. Glenda believes suffering creates endurance. Janice sees that same inheritance as a cage. Neither woman is entirely wrong.
The title, The Obligation, came from the realization that some family relationships continue long after affection has been damaged because people no longer know how to separate duty from devotion. Showing up becomes its own kind of language. Sometimes it’s love. Sometimes guilt. Sometimes fear. Sometimes simply habit worn so deep it resembles fate.
At its heart, this story became about generational grief and the exhausting weight of emotional debts no one remembers agreeing to carry. About mothers and daughters trying to love one another through damage they don’t fully understand. And about the frightening possibility that some families mistake endurance for healing because endurance is all they were ever taught to survive with.