I married into a kitchen where the second pan was already in the oven before anyone said they were hungry. It took me nine years and one consistory vote to see what the pans were doing.
I had been standing in that kitchen about four minutes when she handed me a dish and I understood that I had been given a job.
“Thea. Dry that and put it in the second drawer, not the top one.”
“Second drawer.”
“The top one’s got the good ones and Gerrit’s mother’s are in there and they chip.” She was doing three things. “Did you eat?”
“I ate at home.”
“You had toast.” She reported it, the way a gauge reports. “There’s a plate in the oven, second rack, take the foil off it first or you’ll burn your hand.”
There was a plate in the oven. There had been a plate in the oven since before I got there, and I had told nobody I was coming early, and I had in fact had toast.
That was November of 2017 and I have now been in that kitchen for something like a hundred and forty Sundays.
My name is Thea Kowalczyk. I am forty-one, I work for the state on the Muskegon and the Pere Marquette, and I am a fisheries biologist, which means I count things for a living, and there will be counting in here, and you are going to like me less by about the middle of this.
Here is my sentence about my mother-in-law, and I have had it since roughly my second year: Alida Doornbos’s warmth has a guest list.
The Meijers get a pan of something every fourth week and have since 2011. Ruthanne Sikkema gets a phone call on Sunday nights that runs forty minutes. Marilyn De Kock gets driven to Grand Rapids. When Bram’s cousin Dirk went through his divorce that woman was at his apartment three times a week for eighteen months. And in nine years I have received: a card at my mother’s funeral, a pan of chicken and rice at the lunch after, a plate in the oven when I come early, and the correct number of Christmas presents.
I am not describing coldness. I want that understood before anything else, because it is the thing everybody gets wrong. She has never once been cold to me. She is warm to me every single time and she asks after my work and she remembers that I do not eat pork and she has remembered it for nine years.
Thanksgiving of 2020, at the sink, my sister-in-law Janna said four letters about her mother and then said, “She’s just a textbook — you’ll get her eventually.”
You’ll get her eventually. Like I was six months into a job.
Six years passed before I typed the letters into a search bar, and I would like to claim principle. It was that Janna had been in that family for forty-one years and I had been in it for three, and she handed me a manual for a woman whose approval I had not yet earned, and I declined to take it.
I am forty-one and I am eleven weeks pregnant and I have not told that kitchen, and I have worked out why I have not told that kitchen, and the reason is the subject of everything below.
ESFJ Traits: The Kitchen
That kitchen is a plant. I mean that in the industrial sense.
Two ovens, one of them from 1988 and better than the new one. A table that seats nine and does. A chest freezer in the back hall with a chalkboard tag on the lid. A drawer with eleven pairs of scissors in it that are not scissors for the same things. The counter to the left of the sink is a staging area and nothing is ever put down there that is not going somewhere.
Alida is seventy-four and has been in that house since 1975 and I have never seen her sit down in that room. Not once in nine years. She eats standing at the counter or she eats after, and when the family says Mom, sit down, she sits at the very edge of the chair nearest the stove with her body already angled to get up, and inside four minutes she is up.
She keeps a chalkboard tag on that freezer and it decorates nothing. It is an index, and it is current, and I have watched her go to it and come back with the right thing in under twenty seconds.
She knows what everybody in a nine-mile radius eats and cannot eat and will say they can eat and then not eat. She knows who is not speaking to whom in that congregation and has known it, in every case, before the second party found out. When Gerrit’s brother had his stroke in 2019 she was at that hospital in Grand Rapids before the ambulance had finished the paperwork, and she had, in a bag, his glasses, his hearing aid batteries, and a shirt with buttons instead of a pullover, because they cut pullovers off you.
Once a year in April I ride a stocking truck. Nothing romantic about it. A tanker of oxygenated water with a year class of steelhead smolts in it, and you drive to a site and you temper the water, which means matching the truck’s temperature to the river’s, slowly, or you kill them. Then they go down a chute. What you are doing is supplementation. You put fish into systems that are not recruiting enough on their own, and you do not put fish into systems that are, because the fish you add compete with the fish that are already there and you have spent public money making a lake worse.
I am aware of what I am doing by putting that paragraph in this piece. Hold on to it. I am going to be less careful about it later.
ESFJ Strengths and Weaknesses: September 2022
Before the rest of this section I want the strength on the page at full size, because what comes after will be read as a complaint otherwise. That woman has kept people alive. Not figuratively. Gerrit’s brother had his glasses and his batteries and a shirt he could get into within ninety minutes of a stroke, and there are men in that congregation who ate for a year because of a chalkboard tag on a freezer lid, and every one of those interventions was correct in its particulars in a way that nobody who was not paying that kind of attention could have managed.
My mother died on the eleventh of September, 2022, in Warren, of something that took nineteen days.
Alida sent a card. It was a good card and she wrote four lines in it and the four lines were correct. She and Gerrit drove three hours to the funeral and she brought a pan of chicken and rice to the lunch after and it was, to be precise about it, the best thing on that table by a distance. She hugged me. She asked me twice how I was doing and both times she waited for the answer.
She went home that afternoon.
That same month — I checked, later, because of course I checked — she was at Marilyn De Kock’s four times, and Marilyn De Kock’s situation was that her daughter was moving to Arizona.
That night, at the Comfort Inn on Twelve Mile, I said it to my husband.
I had the numbers. I had been keeping them since about 2019, in a note on my phone, and that belongs on this page in plain sight, because nothing in the account is uglier and it is mine. I told Bram that his mother had done more for a woman whose daughter was relocating than for his wife whose mother was in the ground that afternoon. I told him the count on the Meijers. I told him about Dirk’s year and a half. I said that everybody in that family had decided a long time ago to call it warmth because the alternative was to look at who it went to, and that his mother was the most generous person I had ever met and I had not been able to find the seam in it for five years and I had found it, and the seam was that she picked.
I was not wrong about any of it. Every number I gave him was right.
He sat on the end of that bed and he did not defend her, which I think I wanted, and he did not agree with me either. He said, “Okay.” And then, after a while, “I’m going to need you to not have said that.”
He has not looked at his mother the same way since. Four years. I did that to a man about his own mother, in a motel, on the day we buried mine, and I got what I wanted, and I cannot give it back to him.
ESFJ Behavior: What She Said About the Meijers
The fourteenth of June this year I asked her.
I had decided to in March and I had put it off twice, and both times the reason I gave myself was that it would be unkind, and neither time was that the actual reason. The actual reason is that I have spent nine years in a house where the price of being difficult is that the temperature drops and nobody can tell you why, and I am the only person in that family who has not been acclimatised to it, and knowing that does not make you immune to it.
I had put it off twice. We were in the kitchen, it was after two, everybody was outside, and she was portioning something into two pans, one of which was going and one of which was staying, and I said, as evenly as I could manage:
“Can I ask you something. Why the Meijers?”
She did not tense up, and that is the detail to keep hold of. She looked genuinely pleased to be asked something.
“Oh, Ellen’s had a terrible time.”
“That’s fourteen years, though.”
“Well, she has.” She smoothed the foil down. “And Bob was in the service with Gerrit’s cousin.”
“He was?”
“Or with somebody. Somebody’s cousin.” She reached into the drawer for the marker. “It’s not any trouble, I’m making it anyway.”
She was not making it anyway. I had watched her buy for it. And Ellen Meijer’s terrible time was 2011 and Ellen Meijer has been fine since about 2015 and plays in a euchre league.
I said something about how nice that was, and she said something about the weather, and she wrote MEIJER and the date on the foil in that marker, and I dried a bowl.
I drove home that afternoon on 96 and I had to pull off at the Fruitport exit and sit in a Speedway parking lot for about twenty minutes with the engine running and the air on.
Bob Meijer was never in the service with anybody’s cousin. Bob Meijer worked thirty-one years at the foundry in Muskegon and I have known that since 2019, and so has she.
ESFJ vs ENFJ: The Vroons
Marty Vroon died in March of 2021, at forty-four, and left a wife who was already not well, three kids, and a house.
Two women in that congregation moved on it inside forty-eight hours and this church has been saying the same sentence about the pair of them for twenty years, which is that they are the ones who show up.
Alida went to the house. By Thursday she knew that the middle one would not eat eggs in any form, that the little one had to be handed a plate rather than offered one or she would say she wasn’t hungry, and that Marty’s mother came Tuesdays and Fridays and needed to be got out of the house by four because she was doing more harm than good. That freezer was full by the fourth day, correctly, with what those particular children would actually put in their mouths. She ran that household for eleven weeks — the schedule, the rides, the laundry rotation, three separate arguments settled — and the week Sherri’s sister moved up from Kalamazoo she stopped completely and has not been in that house since, and she does not think of that as a strange thing to have done.
Ruthanne Sikkema looked at the same house and saw five years.
She went at the deacons’ benevolence structure, which had been the same since 1996, and she spent two years and a real amount of goodwill rebuilding it, and there are nine families on a rotation now that still runs and will outlive her. And she got hold of the oldest Vroon boy, Kes, who was seventeen and going nowhere in particular, and she has been steering that kid for five years — the summer job, the two teachers she leaned on, the scholarship she went and found — and he is at Calvin now, and he calls her.
They run the same instrument and neither one waits to be asked. What it is pointed at is not the same. Alida’s reads the condition of the people in front of her right now, in particulars, and acts on the condition. Ruthanne’s reads what a person or a congregation is going to be in five years and builds toward it, and she will spend the present to get there — she spent about six people on that benevolence fight and does not regard that as a cost.
Swap them and the Vroons get less, twice. Ruthanne in that house does not know about the eggs, because she is not looking at the eggs; she builds a committee and the committee delivers the wrong food on a correct schedule. And Alida does not restructure anything, because five years out is not a place she operates, and her position on the fund would have been that the church should keep doing what it has always done, and Kes Vroon is at the plant in Coopersville.
Ruthanne has kept the accounts for the church’s pie auction since 1999 and will not let anybody else touch them and they balance to the penny, and asking her about it once got me “Well, somebody has to,” which is not an answer and is the only one I have ever gotten.
ESFJ Relationships and Compatibility: The Second Pan
This is what proximity to one of them is like, and I have had nine years of the version where your name is not on the list.
You are known. Precisely, unsentimentally, and in a level of detail that would be unnerving if it were not so obviously useful. She knows I do not eat pork. She knows I run cold and there is a blanket on the arm of the chair I sit in and it appeared in year two and nobody mentioned it. She knows what my job is, actually knows, in a way my own father never did.
And you get nothing.
Not nothing in the sense of being slighted. Nothing in the sense of a bucket that does not fill, because the water is going four miles east to a woman whose daughter is moving to Arizona. And you cannot raise it, because there is not one thing on the record to point at. Every individual transaction between me and that woman has been correct and kind.
Fifty-one years of it from inside a marriage, at that same table, rather than a hundred and forty Sundays at the edge of it, is Gerrit’s account. He has not given it in my hearing and I would not know how to ask for it. And a family and a congregation will not put an identical amount of this to the same use.
In 2021 I had a bad autumn at work and told nobody in that family about it, and it lifted, and nothing happened. In 2023 Bram had his back surgery, which is a five-week recovery and a known quantity, and Alida came twice and brought exactly what was needed both times and did not come a third time, and Bram said that was about right.
That is the thing I could not get anybody in that house to look at with me. Ask any of them and you will be told she is the most generous person they have known, and push a little and the same person will tell you they cannot remember the last time she did anything for them specifically. And they do not experience those two statements as being in tension. To them it is a fact about her, like her hands.
I asked Janna once whether she resented her mother. She said no, and then she said, “You think I got more than you? I got the same as you. I’m her daughter, I was always going to be fine.”
I have decided that Janna resents her mother. I have decided it on the basis of nothing and I am keeping it.
ESFJ Careers: Who Ends Up Doing This
The number is doing work here and is not decoration. This is one of the two most common types there are: somewhere near twelve in a hundred overall, closer to seventeen among women and around seven among men. And every other percentage a person meets deserves a hard look at how the sample got assembled, because nearly all of them were collected off whoever volunteered to be measured, or sat through something a workplace paid for, and in my line you do not set a stocking policy off the anglers who mailed in a card.
Seventeen in a hundred women. Now go and look at who staffs a hospice volunteer roster, a funeral lunch rotation, a church care committee, a school office, a nursing home floor, and an oncology unit’s front desk, and ask yourself what fraction of the total labor of keeping people alive in this country is being done, unpaid or barely paid, by that seventeen percent.
Alida ran a district office at a farm insurance agency for nineteen years. Everybody there called her the glue and she was paid like a person who answered the phone.
I looked at what that office did after she left in 2011, because I am the kind of person who looks. Three of the four agents she had held together were gone inside two years and the office consolidated into Grand Rapids in 2014. Nobody has ever written that down anywhere. No statement in that company carries a line saying a woman with an archive of nine hundred farm families in her head walked out the door in March.
She has never once complained about the pay in my hearing, which is its own data point.
How an employer prices that competence, and what fifty years of the price leaves behind at seventy-four, belongs to whoever writes the pay grades. Mine is written for me by a schedule the state publishes. And an identical capacity walks into the same building on two people and comes out with two different titles on it.
ESFJ Under Stress: The Week of the Consistory Vote
In the spring of 2024 that church voted on something. I am not going to relitigate what, because it was a real question with real people on both sides, and because what happened to Alida had almost nothing to do with the substance.
The congregation split about sixty-forty and it split down families. Two households left. Ruthanne was on one side of it and the Meijers were on the other and Alida was, as far as anybody could tell, on no side.
What happened to her that week is that she went silent and then she went sharp.
The silent part first. Three days of a woman in that kitchen with nothing to distribute, because you cannot bring a pan of something to a room that is split — whatever you bring is a position. Her hands had nowhere to go. She reorganized the freezer.
Then on the Thursday she said something to Janna about Janna’s husband that was so precisely aimed and so far out of character that Janna called me about it, and I had never heard Janna sound like that. It was a leap. It was not something Alida had observed; it was a conclusion she had gotten to sideways, about where Doug would be in three years, and it was cruel and it was about forty percent right.
A woman whose entire instrument is the present condition of a room, handed a room she is not permitted to fix, does that. The instrument has nowhere to go, so it turns and produces something it is not built to produce.
One thing plainly, because I watched three days of it and told my husband it would blow over. It blew over. Suppose it had not: a woman like that still unable to do the one thing she does in month three, sleep gone, the sharpness come loose from whatever set it off. No family reaches that and nothing written here reaches it. It wants a physician. It wants somebody with a counseling license. Raising it early has never cost anybody a thing.
In July I ran an experiment.
I let her see me struggling with something I am completely capable of. There is no softer way to put it. I engineered it. I mentioned, in that kitchen, in a particular way, that I was having a hard time with something at work and had not been sleeping.
The apparatus was on inside a day. She called Tuesday and Thursday. There was a pan. She knew, by the second call, the name of the man at the district office I had complained about, and she asked after him by name, and she remembered what I had said about him on Tuesday and asked a follow-up on Thursday. It was warm and it was specific and it was completely genuine.
I got it by manipulating a seventy-four-year-old woman’s care system to confirm a hypothesis, and it worked, and I sat in my car afterward and I have to report that what I mostly felt was pleased.
What Is the ESFJ Personality Type: You Don’t Stock a Lake That’s Reproducing
In June I finally read up on the four letters, six years late.
E — the equipment faces out and it is running continuously. She is not being social. She is monitoring a room the way I monitor a temperature log, and the room’s condition is the thing she is responsible for.
S — and what comes in is particulars. Not people in general. This child, these eggs, that shirt with buttons. An archive of specific facts about specific persons, dated, and she does not forget any of it.
F — and a question gets settled by what the answer does to whoever is standing in it. Defensibility does not come into it anywhere.
J — and it closes. A need is an open item and open items get worked and closed, and the Vroons were closed the week the sister arrived.
The four parts come ranked, by how much of a woman went into each, and here the outward monitoring draws almost the whole allotment and the archive of particulars draws most of what is left. What comes last, with nearly nothing in it, is the part that would let a person stand outside her own system and examine it — and that is the whole answer to the fourteenth of June.
She was not deflecting about the Meijers. She was not protecting anything. I asked a woman why her system does what it does and she went and got a reason, sincerely, at speed, and the reason was not the reason, and she does not have the instrument that would have told her that. Nobody in that family does, because nobody in that family has ever asked, because they all grew up inside it and to them it is weather.
Here is the criterion, and I worked it out in a Speedway parking lot in Fruitport, and I have not said it out loud to anybody.
It has no relation to merit. Affection does not govern it either, and neither does who she likes. The criterion is need, as assessed by her, at a level she cannot articulate and did not choose. Ellen Meijer had a terrible time in 2011 and got put on the list and there is no mechanism for coming off it. Dirk was in trouble. Marilyn De Kock is a woman who cannot manage a hard week. The Vroons were the emergency of a decade.
And I am on nothing, and Janna is on nothing, and Bram is on nothing, and Ruthanne Sikkema — who is her closest friend in the world and gets a forty-minute call every Sunday night — is on the list, and it took me a while to see why until I understood that a forty-minute call is not a resource, it is company, and it is the one line in that entire ledger running both directions.
I have a bad way of putting this and it is the only way that has ever predicted her. You do not stock a lake that is reproducing.
I know what that sounds like. People are not a year class and a family is not a fishery and using that sentence about my husband’s mother makes me sound like exactly the kind of person who would keep a count on her phone since 2019, which I am. But it is the only model I have got that gets the next thing right, and it has gotten the next thing right eleven times running, and I would trade a good deal for a better one.
ESFJ Cognitive Functions: Where the Triage Happens
First comes the outward monitor, and it accounts for most of what that woman is. The book files her four as extraverted feeling, introverted sensing, extraverted intuition, and introverted thinking, in that order, which is also the order of that kitchen.
It runs whether she wants it to or not. She cannot be in a room and not read it, and the reading is not a judgment about people, it is a status check on a system she considers herself accountable for. Which is why she does not sit down. Sitting down is going off shift.
The second part is the archive, and it is why the shirt had buttons.
She holds an enormous, dated, particular store of facts about specific people, and it is not sentimental — she is not remembering fondly, she is holding operating data. The eggs. The pork. The Tuesdays and Fridays and four o’clock. And the assessment gets made against that store: this person, historically, in conditions like these, does or does not cope.
The third part is the one that came out on that Thursday in 2024, and she has very little use for it and no control over it at all.
I have thought about whether the two of those go together — whether a woman who is never wrong about a room right now has to be that bad at three years out, or whether it is just how she came. I do not know. What I can say is that the two capacities have never once appeared in the same week. It leaps. It is not observation and it is not evidence and it arrives sideways, and about forty percent of the time it is right, which is the worst possible hit rate.
And the last is the auditing, and the drawer is bare. Not lightly stocked — bare. She cannot get outside the system and look at it, she never could, and at seventy-four she will not be starting. She is not defending the list. She cannot see it.
One line on how much the whole apparatus carries, since I handle other instruments for a living. The four underlying scales measure something and they hold — take a person’s readings a month apart and the second survey agrees with the first inside the noise, which is more than most of what I sign will do — though one person in three comes back with a different four-letter call, and I would flag that on any survey I signed. Nobody has ever established the move that comes after, where four scales get chopped into sixteen named kinds of person. Somebody chose the sixteen. In my field, a classification that no data produces is a convention, and conventions are useful, and you do not build a management plan on one.
Something like this is a population statistic. You are one animal. Wherever it quits covering you is the only line in it with anything to do with you, and that is the line worth an evening, not the ones that fit.
ESFJ Personal Growth: A Bowl to Dry
The growth material published for this type is about setting limits and asking for things. I have read it now. I would be interested to know who they imagine is reading it.
The only growth I can vouch for in this account does not belong to her. It is mine, and it is eleven weeks old.
I have stopped counting. The note is still on my phone, from 2019 to the fourteenth of June, 2026, four hundred and some entries, and I have not added one since the Speedway parking lot. Not because I forgave her. Because the count was measuring the wrong quantity and I had built nine years on it, and my husband is still carrying what I did with it in a motel room in Warren, and there is not a version of that I get to have back.
What I actually have is a working model of a woman that predicts her correctly and that I cannot use for anything. I know how to get on the list. I have done it once, on purpose, and it is available to me any time I want to be somebody who does that.
What I do not have, and what I would like somebody to tell me how to get, is a way onto that list that does not involve being in trouble. I have tried the direct route since June. I have said, in that kitchen, that I would like to see more of her. She said that would be lovely and meant it entirely and nothing changed, because asking is not an input that system accepts. Presenting is. Nine years and the only thing that has ever moved the apparatus toward me is a lie I told in July.
I still think Janna resents her.
Sunday I was in that kitchen and everybody was outside and she was doing three things, and I told her my mother used to make a thing with sour cream and dill that I have never once gotten right and that I have quit trying to, and that I have been thinking about her a lot this year, and that it is not a problem, I am fine.
She said, “Well, you would be.”
And then she said her mother made something with dill too and that she never got it either, and she was quiet a second, and she handed me a bowl and I dried it.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.