Stop Saying You've Become Your Parents' Parent

I said it at a dinner in March. Someone asked how my mother was doing and I said fine, good, though honestly it’s starting to feel like the roles are being reversed and she is my child. It got the laugh it was designed to get. Someone else at the table said God, yes, the role reversal, and told a story about her father and a parking garage, and the conversation moved on, and I sat there feeling like I’d sold something that wasn’t mine to sell.

It took me a while to figure out what exactly.

Here’s what my mothering of my mother amounted to, the week I made that joke. I renewed a prescription online because the pharmacy’s website had changed. I read a letter from her pension fund out loud and told her it required nothing from her, which is true of most official mail, which she does not believe. I spent maybe eleven minutes on hold with her internet provider. That’s it. That was the parenting.

Now the other side of the ledger. When I was actually a child, this woman fed me thousands of meals. She taught me to read. She sat through fevers, she learned the bus routes to a hospital I don’t remember being in, she went to work the next morning anyway. She did this for years, without a break, without once describing it at a dinner party as a burden, as far as I know.

Eleven minutes on hold is not that. It’s not a small version of that. It’s a different thing entirely, and I got a laugh by pretending otherwise.

But that’s only half of what bothered me, and it’s the smaller half. The bigger problem with the sentence is what it quietly gives you permission to do. A parent doesn’t just help a child. A parent decides for a child. What they eat, where they go, what they’re told and not told, what’s safe. The moment I call myself her parent, even as a joke, I’ve smuggled all of that authority into my bag. And I’ve noticed it come out of the bag, too. The time I didn’t tell her about a cousin’s diagnosis for three weeks because she’d “only worry.” The way I once said we’ll see about a trip she was planning with the walking group. We’ll see. To a woman who ran a household and half an office for thirty years.

She raised a person. Two actually. I restarted a router. These are not the same job, and only one of us has ever actually done the other one’s.

I keep thinking about why the sentence exists at all, though, because everyone says it, and everyone saying it can’t just be everyone being cruel. It’s the only socially acceptable container for a bunch of things that are hard to say plainly: I’m tired. This wasn’t in my plans. I’m watching someone change and it frightens me. The person who took care of everything now needs things taken care of, and nobody gave me a word for what I am to her now. So we borrow the only caregiving word we know. Parent.

It’s the wrong word. But I understand reaching for it. I reached for it in March, and the laugh felt terrible about four hours later, which in my experience is the usual delivery time.

People don’t tell me their children have become their parents. But they can hear it happening. They tell me about that.

A woman I talk with often described the moment her son started using what she calls his kindergarten voice. She can date it, more or less, to a fall she had two winters ago. Nothing broke. But afterwards the voice arrived, slower and brighter than his real one, and it has never fully gone away. She said the strange part is that he doesn’t know he’s doing it, and she’s never told him, because he drives an hour each way to see her and she is not going to spend that visit correcting his tone.

That’s the shape I hear over and over. They notice everything. The new voice. Being praised, suddenly, for ordinary acts, well done, that’s a good walk you took. Questions that used to be conversations turning into checks. And the reason they say nothing is not that it doesn’t hurt. It’s that the tone and the help arrive in the same package, and they’re afraid that objecting to one means losing the other. So the price of the lift to the doctor is being spoken to like the waiting room is a school trip. Most of them pay it. They mention it to me instead, the way you’d complain about weather. Something real, that nobody caused on purpose, that soaks you anyway.

I want to be fair to the children here, because the people I talk with usually are. One man put it better than I can. He said, my daughter isn’t bossy, she’s scared, and being scared makes people bossy. They know the control is love with its collar up. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier to be on the receiving end of we’ll see.

The thing I’d offer, from hundreds of these conversations, is that nobody I speak with wants to be anyone’s child again. Not one. Even the ones who need real help, daily help, help with things more intimate than routers. What they describe wanting is closer to what you’d want from a good colleague on a hard project. Someone who shows up, does the part they’re asked to do, and assumes competence about everything else. The project is her old age. She’s still running it. You’re the help that was hired, and if you’re lucky, also the company she keeps.

There’s no perfect replacement sentence. We tried to find one and everything sounds like a brochure.

But “I help my mother with some things now” is at least true, and it fits in the same slot at dinner. It just won’t get the laugh.

And the audit of it is simple enough. Before deciding something for her, or softening some news, or saying we’ll see, there’s one question that sorts it: would I do this to a difficult, brilliant colleague of seventy-four? Or only to a child?

She’s not a child. She’s the first adult you ever met.

That seems worth keeping straight.