Parenting the Parents

Like most kids, I hated when my parents worried about me.

The first type of worry I encountered was the kind that was fully warranted from a parent’s perspective and completely unnecessary as far as the child was concerned. In my younger days, my parents worried about whether I ate enough vegetables and if I had learned to read–both wastes of time, I thought. Maybe I tossed some vegetables back into the serving dish when my mom’s back was turned, but I did end up eating most of it. And in my defense, I ate all of it after the day I tried to do a fancy slam-dunk, and hit my mother on the nose with a zucchini slice.

Worrying about my reading skills was even more ridiculous. I spent so much time buried in my Bobbsey Twins and Happy Hollisters that after a while, my parents started worrying instead about how much I was reading and whether I was going to end up blind. But patiently, I put up with their paranoid fears. I was a child, after all, and just like Wonder Woman, I was invincible. If it made my parents feel better to worry about me, then I’d let them worry.

But after my graduation from college, the worry didn’t end. This new worry was the quiet despairing kind that made parents wonder if their job would ever be done. My sisters both lived out of state and consequently had worked out an informal understanding with my parents that if they didn’t call, then everything was going fine. On the rare occasions when they called, my father would answer the phone and immediately ask, “You need money?”

If the answer was negative, he passed the phone to my mother, secure in the knowledge that he had completed his duty. If anything else important occurred, his wife would find out and tell him what to do about it later.

Unlike my sisters, I was still living at home where my every move was scrutinized. The more my parents saw of my life, the more they worried about what they didn’t see. They needed to know where I was going, when I would be back, and was I still going out with that scary old guy? They fussed over how much I ate, how much I slept, and how to make me happy.

But then we met Chris.

Chris arrived as my other boyfriend was exiting. My mother hardly had time to celebrate the departure of the too-old, too-crazy boyfriend before another boy came knocking at our door. But this time, things were different.

Even before Chris and I got officially engaged, my parents had already started changing. For one thing, they were thrilled every time I went out with him. Previous dates had been an annoyance to my parents, who eyed them suspiciously, muttered awkward hellos in English, and then left the room as quickly as possible.

When Chris visited, I couldn’t get them to leave us alone. They even tried to talk to him in Taiwanese because they forgot that he wasn’t their own kid. And on the rare occasions when Chris wasn’t with me, my parents asked where he was, and when he’d be back. If I hadn’t liked Chris so much myself, I might have been persuaded to dump him in the face of this overwhelming parental approval.

Chris didn’t like seafood, unless it was sushi, and my mother enthusiastically churned out platters of beef and chicken on the nights he stayed for dinner. My father asked Chris’s opinion on various stock prices, and nodded wisely when Chris answered. But more important than their feelings about Chris was the fact that this was the boy who was going to take me off their hands.

When Chris and I married, my parents gladly dumped all their worries about me onto Chris. They still love me as much as they ever did, but now that they know Chris has my back covered, events which induced insomnia in the past are now barely worthy of a shrug. If I tell them I was in a car accident, they say “Oh, you need to drive more carefully.” Before I can protest, or reiterate how close I was to death, they quickly move on to what they consider to be far more important news. “White peaches are on sale at Market Basket this week — only 99 cents a pound!”

Carefree and happy, my parents are empty nesters and loving it. Their lives revolve around their dancing group, their stock club meetings, and potluck nights–all of which involve vast quantities of food being consumed. I speak more to their answering machine than to them, and when I do hear from them, it’s usually because they need something from me.

My father’s computer broke recently, and he placed an immediate call to me. “Hi Jane, when are you coming over?” he said when I answered the phone.

“Hey, you could at least say ‘how are you’ or something first,” I complained.

“Oh, sorry! How…are…you,” he said slowly. He paused, waiting a polite three seconds before adding, “When can Chris come over and fix my computer?”

Chris fixed the computer, but the next emergency was just around the corner. This time my father wanted to know why he couldn’t access his stock market site from work.

“They probably put up some kind of firewall so you can’t see those sites while you’re supposed to be working,” I told him.

My father grunted. “Well, I ask the computer help guy, I tell him I use this before, and he didn’t say anything about firewall.”

“You told your computer support department? Dad! You’re not supposed to be looking at these sites at work. You’re supposed to be working! You could get fired!”

My father said, “Yeah,” which meant he had stopped listening to me. He then said, “Let me talk to Chris.”

I put Chris on the phone.

“Your company set up a firewall so that no one can view these web sites at work,” Chris told him.

My father didn’t completely believe Chris either, but at least he was pacified long enough to hang up the phone. The next time I saw him, my father told me proudly that he had “found another site and cranked it” and now he could get to his financial web site from work. He divulged this information only after looking around to make sure the CIA wasn’t listening. Upon further questioning he refused to give me details, possibly because he himself didn’t quite understand how it worked.

That may have been the end of it as far as my father was concerned, but I worried for days afterward until Chris assured me that it was unlikely my father would get fired for looking at Yahoo online.

“It’s not like it’s a porn site,” he said.

I really didn’t want to think about that.

My parents had always liked Chris, but after the day he fixed my parents’ TV, he became more important than the President. In their child-free wealth, my parents had splurged and purchased a satellite dish with a subscription to a tv feed from Taiwan. Once the system was installed, though, my parents were forced to watch their lone Taiwanese channel because they couldn’t figure out how to switch back to their normal stations. Chris spent one afternoon setting up an elaborate system using a VCR, cable box, various cords and switches, and when he finished, my parents could alternate between domestic and imported shows with a simple press of a button.

My parents still didn’t watch anything other than their Taiwanese programs, but the mere fact that they could was enough to excite them. Even more important, Chris had fixed the reception so that their TV shows came in clearly and with a sharpness that astounded my parents, who had assumed that television had not advanced since they bought their last TV set in 1984.

From then on, my father could be found perched on the couch behind the dusty treadmill, glued to a news program. During dinner, he came out of the family room to hastily shovel a few mouthfuls of food in his mouth, and then darted back to his seat in front of the TV. If a particularly exciting soap opera was on, my mother would load up her plate, excuse herself, and join my father. The food was better than anything we could make at home, or we would have just stopped visiting.

Occasionally I called after 10:30 pm just to see if I could catch them napping with the TV on in the background.

“Why don’t you just go to sleep,” I’d ask. “You have to go to work tomorrow!”

“We just want to finish watching this,” my mother said. “We were eating watermelon seeds and now we’re watching something very good.”

“Well, what’s the show about? Tell me right now what’s happening on the show,” I demanded.

My mother paused. “I’ll let you talk to Daddy,” she said quickly.

My parents recently sold their second home to the family that was renting it, and I only found out about it when the deal was done. Not only did they sell the house for about $50,000 less than the prevailing market rate, but they’d completely disregarded all of my suggestions. I’d bought two houses in the last two years, and my parents had bought their house thirty years ago and still thought dishwashers were for storing dishes.

At the same time that they ignore my advice, they rely on me to jump to their rescue. One Sunday morning, while I was happily dreaming that my dogs had found a winning lottery ticket, I was awakened by the phone ringing.

“Jane, Jane, we’re in Connecticut,” I heard faintly. “I think I left the stove on. No one remembers. I called Mrs. Han but she wasn’t home. Can you drive over and check?”

Dimly, I remembered that my parents were on another of their trips and gambling at Mohegan Sun that day. “Why can’t Mrs. Chang check the house?” I asked, naming the neighbor who kept an extra set of keys to my parents’ house.

“They’re gone,” my mom said. “Maybe you can try calling them, and Mrs. Han before you have to drive so far to our house. Call me back on Daddy’s cell phone.”

I struggled out of bed and phoned Mrs. Han. Apparently my father had left a detailed message, because she seemed to know more about what was going on than I did. “Glenna’s home,” she said, “try calling her.”

I called Glenna, the oldest child in the Chang family. “I’m about to leave for a wedding,” she said. “But we tried every key in the house, and none of them worked.”

“Did you try the little apple?” I asked. I thought I remembered seeing our keys in their house, on a keychain with a small wooden apple attached.

“Yes, that didn’t work,” Glenna said. “I tried the little apple, the little pear, and even the little pepper, but none of them worked.”

I called my parents back. My father answered the phone.

“What does the keychain with your keys look like?” I asked.

My father paused. “I let you speak to Mom.”

I told them that as soon as they got home, they had to go over to the Chang’s house, find their key, and write their name on it in English. After that they were to go to Mrs. Han’s house and give her a copy of their key as well. Then I woke up my husband.

“Get up,” I told Chris. “Do you want to come with me to my parents’ house, or can you tell me right now what I should do if the house exploded?”

It turned out that my mother hadn’t left the gas on at all, and when she got home, she explained that my grandmother had turned it off for her that morning, but just hadn’t remembered until later.

My mother thanked us effusively on the phone, and my father sent me an e-mail that night, thanking me again.

“Mom cut finger last night,” he typed laboriously. “She don’t remember too many things right now.” Apparently he was politely ignoring the fact that he couldn’t remember his children’s names even when he wasn’t stricken by a bodily injury. “Thanks you come to our house. I have tense game in morning.”

I visualized my father frowning in concentration, all attention focused on his tense game, before Chris decoded that one for me. Evidently my father had a tennis game the next day.

Despite the difficulties in driving to their house on such short notice that day, the visit was still easier without them actually in the house. On another routine computer visit, we pulled into their driveway and noticed it was covered with yellow streaks.

Before I’d even put the car in park, my mother ran outside.

“Look at this!” she said, pointing at the streaks. “What happened? It’s acid rain!”

“No, Mom, it’s just pollen or something,” I said. “You know, from trees and bushes and stuff.”

My mother frowned dubiously. “Daddy said it was acid rain.”

My father came outside to greet us, but my mother turned toward him. “It’s acid rain, right?”

“Acid rain,” my father agreed. “All over neighbor’s house, too!”

“I asked Mrs. Chang and she said–”

“It’s pollen,” I shouted over them. “Pollen — the stuff I’m allergic to. From plants and things.”

My mother turned to Chris. “Is it acid rain?” she demanded.

“Nah, it’s just pollen.”

My mother turned back to my father. “I told you it wasn’t acid rain!”

“It’s not acid rain, ” my father agreed complacently. “That’s what I told you.”

When did I become the parent, and they the children? I worry about my parents constantly-is my dad going to be fired from his job and become the oldest day trader in the world? Will I have to support them through their imminent bankruptcy? And will my mother get lost at the supermarket, trying to find her car?

My parents party all the time, don’t sleep enough, and don’t listen to me. They take me for granted, and only come to me when they need something. They’re having the times of their lives, and in the midst of my exasperation and frustration, sometimes I have to stop myself from telling them, “Just wait until you have children like you!”

Posted by: ssjane | September 5, 2002 | 5:02 pm
Posted in: Rants | Comments Off