June 25, 2007 | Filed under: I Write About My Feelings, The Fam

Wow. Apparently I get a little crabby when I stay up past my bedtime. (Uh, 9 PM.) Sorry about that.

The parents have returned safely to their homeland, and now we can get back to our regular schedule of intermittent and all-too-infrequent posting here. Ahhhhhhhh.

We’re so accustomed to living far away from each other that sometimes it’s weird spending that much continuous time with my family. While all that togetherness drives me a little crazy, I am often struck by an overwhelming sense of “I am SO MUCH their child.” (This is not unique to me — my siblings suffer the same fate.)

These days, though, we’ve moved into more of a peer relationship, and less of a parent-child relationship. We talked about financial planners and life insurance and mutual funds, people, mutual funds. (I’m in need of one. Anyone have a recommendation?) In describing to my parents how the Comcast On Demand feature works, I characterized it as telling the remote control to “Bring me my movie, bitch!” Mom tried to scold me for using naughty language, but she was too busy laughing.

But then there were the times when I felt like the parent. Or at least the official worry-wart. They are clearly aging, especially my dad, and it concerns me. He often doesn’t realize you’re talking to him until the end of the sentence, and then you have to repeat the whole thing. He loves to drive and has spent most of his adult life in the transportation industry, but now he is less confident about where to go and how to get around unfamiliar places. He accelerates too much and brakes too little and is absolutely going to pitch a fit when we finally take the car keys away from him and, short of him being in a coma, I don’t know how to accomplish that task gently.

I think about where they might retire and if they can afford it and worry about them making new friends there. I wonder if we kids will live close enough and be available enough to help out, or if we’ll fall into the same visit-for-one-week-during-
the-summer schedule that defined our childhoods and our relationships with our grandparents.

I wonder if I worry too much.

But for now, when I’m not around to see it everyday, I can ignore their aging and they will live in my mind’s eye as the parents I left when I went away to college. And I’ll be surprised again at Christmas to see how much they’ve changed, and I’ll start worrying all over again.

1. Superfantastic says:
   

   Mutual funds? Worrying? I have no response to this post.

   June 25th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
2. Aimee says:
   

   I love your description of on demand. lol

   It’s weird when the worry goes both ways, instead of parents just worrying about their kids.

   June 28th, 2007 at 10:03 am