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Recently I was catching up with a friend about our late-summer plans. She was heading to her dad’s place with her two kids, bracing herself for what sleeping arrangements awaited. It wasn’t looking promising. Her father and stepmother have repurposed one guest room into a home office that’s off-limits to the kids, and her adult stepsister has moved back in, so every spare room is claimed. My friend has looked at Airbnbs, but the surrounding area is horrifically expensive. “I wish they could just make it work,” she sighed. We talked for a while, circling something we never said out loud: Did her dad welcome her visit?
During the summer visiting season, it can be hard to know for sure. I have come out in favor of overcrowded winter holiday-season visits, and it’s true, perfect accommodations are totally unnecessary if the welcome is sincere. Cousins were meant to share too-small spaces during the holidays. But summer visits to our aging parents have their own flavor. They are of indeterminate length and there isn’t a set menu of rituals and meals. In this looseness, which we associate naïvely with the possibility for summertime relaxation, oblivion lurks.
And our relationship to our parents’ homes is a complicating factor. Going back to our childhood homes as adults is inevitably a collision. This collision is kind of fun for some of us: We get to alienate our partners by regressing a bit while enjoying the indulgence and shared eccentricities of our families. Others experience this collision as disorienting and lonely. Was I ever really at home here? Do these people know me at all? Would they rather we just FaceTimed instead? There are very often new people living with our aging parents, people we sometimes don’t know very well. Even as adult children, it can feel odd to spend time with our parents in houses that can’t accommodate us anymore. It can be tempting to feel sorry for ourselves, as if something that was promised us is being withheld.
It’s not so terribly wrong to feel this way. When I was born, both of my grandmothers were already old ladies, in both habit and appearance. They were widows, and each lived alone until her death. Their homes remained unchanged for my entire childhood, everything in its place, every food item ritualistically procured and ready for our arrival. I slept in the same spare rooms well into my teens, under the same bedspreads. It was all pretty boring, and I have no idea how my parents felt about these visits. But it was consistent, which counted for a lot. There was never any question about whether we would visit.
I don’t mean to idealize the past. Both of my grandmothers were housewives, the only respectable path open to them. Their lives were constrained in ways that I will never comprehend, and if old age looks different today, it’s because in some ways the world is actually improving. Most people, if they can help it, like to feel young for as long as possible.
We don’t ask our elders to organize their entire lives around their families like my grandmothers did. But the changes in the culture of old age ripple out into the rest of family life, in ways that I don’t always expect, and that aren’t well accounted for in the way we imagine spending time with our relatives. In a couple of weeks my family is making our annual pilgrimage to my mother-in-law’s place, but she won’t be home for at least half of our visit. She’s written a play that will be performed in another city and has rehearsals to attend. We are all thrilled for her, and proud. And also, in a childish way, disappointed.
Old folks may be getting younger, but adult children don’t seem to be getting more mature. Ideally, we would all converge at a collective spiritual 56 years old, spry, wise, and not irrationally attached to the idea that we remain someone’s child, with a child’s need to be treated with a special kind of solicitude. But there will be no such convergence, which means we’re left to try to communicate our needs, clumsily, with shaky scripts that aren’t even a generation old.
I wonder if some of what makes having aging boomer parents hard sometimes is that we no longer lean on these old reliable — if limiting — expectations about how old people “should” behave. Sometimes I suspect my friends and I expect elders to behave like old-school grannies and grampies while also wanting them to be fully actualized independent people who wear Hokas and know their way around a Trader Joe’s. We can’t hold our parents to that double standard, expecting them to be both cooler than previous generations and equally duty bound.
Of course, there is a cheat code for elders who want to be adored and appreciated by their children and grandchildren: Offer to host the grandkids by themselves. This is contingent on good health, but that’s about it. All “grandma’s house” really needs is a microwave, a big screen, and a cot. For the past two summers, my stepfather and his wife that he married after my mom died (my step-step? See, we don’t have terms for these situations yet) have hosted my kids for a week. I wasn’t sure they would be up for it this summer, so I asked. Asking is fine — they said yes, and the kids had a great time. I consider us among the lucky ones, and both of my actual parents are dead!
As we muddle through sorting out expectations in these formless seasons, nothing works like direct communication spoken with kindness. We can’t assume that our parents are waiting by the phone for us to call, but we have no right to sulk. Generationally speaking, we are helping boomers figure out what it means to be old by assigning them duties and asking them to help us when we need it. Which is what my friend ended up doing — she called her dad back and said that she needed him to make room for her and her kids, even just for a night or two. No more playing it cool and leaving it up to chance. No more festering resentment over how things might otherwise be. It might put him out, but he’ll get over it. It’s baby steps, for all of us, all the way to the grave.
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