My mom’s stressing me out. Earlier in the week, she wrote me an email about ordinary stuff, but buried in the text was something to the effect that both she and Dad like Mr. W and have we talked about the future? Mr. W was good about it and laughed it off (we haven’t even been dating 6 months!), and today, she writes me again in an email that very sweetly reviews her family life starting from her marriage to now, and says that she got married, had a kid, put the kid thru college, helped her get into her first house, and now she’s going to prepare for retirement “and…something else.” And then she goes into how she wishes that, presumably before the “something else,” she will get to see me at my wedding and then hold her grandchild. And then in a later paragraph, she asks if I’m going to help her with her living trust.

I had never liked having to address my parents’ mortality. It used to scare me to death as a kid until I gulped and decided not to worry about such an improbability when I was in middle school. In middle school, my parents had brought home 2 blank certificate-looking wills and just had it on the wet bar so that when I came home from school at the ripe mature age of 12 or 13, I freaked out. Those forms stayed empty and undealt with for months or years until I felt better about it, and then they just disappeared.

It’s rough shouldering the responsibility of your parents as an only child. People assume that I’m spoiled by them, and to an extent, I guess I was. I did get everything without having to share. But I also got their bad moods, the butt of their bad days, all of their expectations and disappointments. The thing with being just one person is that you get both the long and the short ends of the stick. It was a selfish decision to move out of their house on my own, and very anti-traditional Asian. My mom cried nightly when I first moved out. I go home regularly and visit them on the weekends (look at that, I still call their house “home”, as tho I were in college), just like all the good little Asian kids who have moved out due to school or work, and that alleviates the guilt somewhat. But generally I shrug it all into the back of my head. The guilt that I should be taking care of them (altho they are autonomous and I’m very proud of my immigrant parents for that), that I should be more involved in their daily lives, that I should have a finger on the pulse of their health and know what’s going on and be doing things to help them improve their health. I feel guilty that the weekend visits are almost dealt with like a mandatory chore in my perceived-busy life instead of something I look forward to.

Speaking of health, my mom said in an off-hand way in an email string a couple of weeks ago that she had to go now because she had a doctor’s appointment. My mom’s always had doctors’ appointments as I was growing up. It was something I was used to and I normally wouldn’t ask much. But normally I’d get my information from her complaining about the healthcare network or the doctors’ vague reports. This time, when I responded to her email the next day asking what the appointment was for, she deliberately kept it from me, saying it’s too complicated to explain and then just changing the subject. I responded to the subject she changed it to succinctly, and then deliberately readdressed the doctor’s appointment, asking again what it was and how it went. She wrote, “nothing, just a blood test.” How is that complicated?! She’s keeping something from me. And now all this weird pressure to rush my life that she’d never done before. Either she and my dad REALLY like Mr. W, or something’s egging her on. *anxiety puke*