Parents Just Don't Understand

[joni]

The last two weeks have felt pretty different in terms of seemingly reasonable people losing their shit in all of this. Anyone else have parents that are being insanely lax all of a sudden? My in-laws had a couple over to their house (INSIDE!?) last night and no one wore masks. Today we are filled with dread.

[RCH]

I have been relieved that my mom has been socially distancing and masking/hand washing through all of this. The auto parts factory she works at just re-opened this week after about two months and I am a bit edgy about it. I've been grilling her about what they've done to protect their workers and luckily they have made good changes but I'm still like "wash your hands. You didn't hug anyone, right?" when she gets home.

She has historically not done a great job of taking care of herself, but she gets the need to be vigilant (she listens pretty exclusively to NPR, so at least she has the big picture view of the need to stay safe). In April, one day she was like "if I get this thing I'd probably die." I was like YES that's what I've been trying to tell you since February. She turns 60 today, she's a smoker, has had pneumonia, is diabetic, etc.

My neighbor has chronic health issues from RA and long-undiagnosed hepatitis. He is not fucking around, thank goodness, and when we catch up (I get him groceries or he comes with me sometimes) I always go over my safety precautions and reiterate the need to continue vigilance as we both wear masks. Luckily he is on board because we are not fixing to play chicken over here.

My therapy group leader proposed an in-person meeting soon, since we haven't met since March. I am not exactly chomping nor champing at the bit for that. At least two members have autoimmune or other chronic health conditions. My preference would be to imagine scenarios that would guarantee the safety of the most vulnerable and build out from there. I wanted to say over Zoom "the governor is only allowing gatherings of LESS than 10" but I haven't forgotten being treated as a naysayer back in February when I asked the group if we should consider pausing meetings. I hope they all stay safe, but I will keep my distance for now.

[yourfriendclaire]

I’m having this cognitive dissonance problem with my parents where they seem to be able to reasonably discuss the pandemic—they listen to NPR, read news reports from outside of the US, my Dad posts endless anti-Trump takedowns on Facebook—but then they do not internalize the actual message. On some level they seem to think nothing bad can actually happen to them, and they are unable to face down that assumption as a consequence of their privilege. I think for them the pandemic is still something that happens to other people, and since Oregon has had a relatively low case number they’re assuming that means the worst is over in their area. They’re planning on traveling to Los Angeles to continue their quarantine closer to us, so I insisted they get tested before they arrive (we’re getting tested on Monday) so we can have some peace of mind. And then they hung out with their friends unmasked and indoors immediately after getting tested! What’s the point of anything????

[yourfriendclaire]

PS - happy birthday to your mom, [mention]RCH[/mention]!

[m o l l y]

It is frustrating. I get that my folks are being pretty reasonable considering what the rest of Arizona is doing. Apparently bars in Tucson are FULL.
My dad is in his 70's and snuck out to the bagel place to meet with his usual group of jewish guys in their 70's from Brooklyn who he met by accident at the bagel place. I guess one of them knew my grandpa's Brooklyn diner as a kid? It's cute. He super active and social and healthy and refuses to believe that he is at risk solely because of his age. Anyway, I told him that they should zoom-eat bagels. I actually told him, "look all of us are living inside of our yardless apartments not because we are afraid of getting sick, but to help at-risk people not get sick. What is the point if at-risk people are running around having bagels with each other?" I think that made sense to him. But yeah, middle class white boomer privilege is a hard nut to crack.

[ritchey]

If this helps, I finally broke through with my parents by writing them a pretty melodramatic guilt-trip email about communal responsibility. I think framing it in terms of the danger to ourselves is the wrong way to go, and particularly useless when it comes to Boomers and teenagers. My parents' identities are very based on demonstrating how healthy and vigorous they are, so appeals to them to stay home because they are old and at-risk actually backfire, and just make them want to go take even more risks to prove how not-afraid of illness and death they are. So even as my campus was shutting down and we were all moving online--which, to me, felt like the most unheard-of batshit apocalyptic thing, nothing like that has EVER happened--and governors were issuing shelter in place orders, my parents were still talking about their planned trip to fly on a plane in 2 weeks to come see me and take a train to NYC and go to an opera. I kept saying "there is no reality in which that is going to happen" but they'd just laugh and say oh, lets just wait and see. Like it was gonna blow over in 2 weeks? Like a state university would willingly choose to close, refund everybody's housing and lab fees, and thus lose 40 million dollars, just on a whim? I sent them articles, I told them it was serious, etc. etc. and they sort of got it but then I'd call and they'd be like "oh I just got back from a hike with Sally and Karen" so clearly they did not get it. It was so stressful and I couldn't sleep. The final straw was they had these stupid tickets to go see a screening of Oscar shorts at their local theater. I was like, that's an easy thing to just skip, please don't go to that. And they SAID THEY WOULDN'T but then I found out later that THEY LIED TO ME. My psychotic mother could not just sit there and "waste" the fucking FOUR DOLLARS they had already spent on those tickets. So they just went. I was infuriated. And they said no one else was in the theater, even though the event had been sold out. They found this "funny." Anyway I freaked out and wrote them this epic melodramatic email basically calling them selfish and self-centered and THIS was the tack that worked. Here is what I leaned on:
- staying home is NOT ABOUT YOU, it is about EVERYONE ELSE. We could all have the virus right now, which means every time you go on a hike with your fuckin' 8 pals, you are knowingly potentially exposing them to a virus that could kill them
- what if you gave the virus to Ellen (friend going through chemo, who is very frail right now)? How would that feel?
- what if you came to see us as planned and then Andrew and I got sick and died, how would you like that?
- what if you get sick and die and Buck and I can't even get to you to be there with you, and we are traumatized forever because you had to go see the Oscar shorts because you'd already paid $4 for your tickets
- doctors, a type of person who you respect, are literally crying and begging people to stay home because hospitals are so overloaded that they are having to make horrible decisions about who lives and who dies, so every time you go hang out with your pals you are showing doctors you don't give a shit about them

Anyway this finally worked. They called me and were like oh my god we are sorry. And since then they've been very uptight about masks and social distance. But you have to stay constantly vigilant, it's so weird. They did great throughout April but now they are slipping. The other day I called and they were packing up to go on a camping and hiking trip with their huge friend group. "We're going to stay at different campsites and hike 6 feet apart from each other." I was again furious but tried to just kind of socratically ask questions, like "what is so bad about staying at home, for you, that risking your life and the lives of all your best friends is worth it?" lol. My mom kind of freaked out (she didn't know how to answer that question, for example, which I thought was interesting) but they did cancel the trip. But I can see that they (particularly my mom) are going to constantly be trying to find loopholes and it does cause me a lot of anxiety. They also are very focused on driving to Portland in July for my dad's yearly cancer check-up, which I understand, but I'm not sure how or whether to talk them out of it. Weighing all this stuff is really hard.

Meanwhile my brother in Hawaii is just still working normal 9-5 shifts on the construction crew and has been all along. Has never stayed home a single day. No masks, no social distancing, no hazard pay. His girlfriend works in the co-op there and says it's just slammed every day with people hassling her about too much milk in their latte. So that is a whole other level of emotional anxiety for me but I can't do anything about it so I focus on hectoring my Boomer parents.

It depends on what type of Boomer your parents are. Mine are very much the left-leaning flower-power lets live on a commune type of Boomer, so appeals to social responsibility work on them. If you've got the Wall St. Journal type of Boomer I think it won't be as effective. Anyway this is my advice for what it is worth. And also, just wanted to express solidarity with how stressful this is as adult children. SAD

[yourfriendclaire]

Woof. We're all in it! My parents definitely have the same "can't keep us down" attitude, of feeling as though quarantine diminishes their essential vitality and hastens their journey to the old folks' home/grave. My mom has several times, in our arguments about this, told me that I can't understand her perspective because although a year of quarantine may be a blip in my life, it represents, say, a tenth of the life she has left, or more. Why she would then want to risk her life (and those of her friends) is beyond me, but I understand the emotional response. It's an abnegation of death itself.

The other argument she makes is that like it or not, the pandemic is our new normal in the US, and we have to start weighing the mental health benefits of being with others against the risk we take when we see them. In their minds they're already in this long-term status quo, this partial reopening of life, where you just go out into the world and hope for the best.

I guess that--beyond the particularities of this situation--the deeper mindfuck is being reminded that my parents, who taught me how to be a human being, do not, in fact, have everything under control or have all the answers. I mean, I knew that as a teenager (this being the central realization that frees one to leave home) but seeing them willfully ignore the facts here makes me feel as though the adult responsibilities of our family are suddenly mine alone, and I don't have the answers either!

[astral hellion]

I literally just got hung up on by my mother because we were fighting about how her friend is getting on an airplane and flying from Minnesota to Texas on June 3 to stay in my parents’ house for a week. FOR VACATION.
I asked my mom repeatedly why this trip had to happen now & her response was “It just is. This was the best time. She can’t change it.” I told her that she was literally LYING to me, that her friend most absolutely could change her trip, that I would PAY for her friend to change her trip, what if this friend is already sick/catches something on the airplane & gets both my over-70 prior-health-issues parents sick, what if they die, why is this worth it? NO ANSWERS, just this reassurance “Don’t worry, I don’t think anything like that is going to happen to us, I just don’t!”
I said all the words, I cried, to no avail. She told me we would have to “agree to disagree” and I said no, I do NOT agree.
Now I am planning to call her friend tomorrow & yell at her, which my mom has forbidden me to do, but I told her that since she doesn’t want to take my feelings & concerns into consideration, I don’t need to worry about what she does or doesn’t want me to do in this regard.
So that was a cool cortisol blast right before bed.

[yourfriendclaire]

That’s so rough, I’m sorry!

[ritchey]

oh my god, that is AWFUL. I am so sorry. So stymying and frustrating and just maddening! I hope the friend will allow herself to be shamed into altering these plans. KEEP US POSTED

willingly getting on an airplane right now, for no pressing reason, is literally one of the craziest things I can imagine. It is WILD how differently we are all experiencing this historic event. I wonder if there were people during the Blitz in London being like "Aw come on, those Jerries aren't gonna come TONIGHT, let's go out dancing." I bet there were actually