Alienation in Times of Isolation

I don’t know how I’ll feel when my parents die. I have committed the cardinal sin against the boomer generation, I’ve alienated myself from my parents. My mother-in-law, god bless her, really really wants to help fix it, but has thus far kept an appropriate distance. I can see her discomfort though. She has immense nervous energy, and she’s extremely Irish Catholic. Her subconscious might as well be screaming “How could you do this to your own mother?!?!?” at me.

I am oddly comfortable with the discomfort I cause in the parents of people I date. It’s not that I’m a bad person, it’s that I’m a willful and impulsive human. But I’m an adult now and so are the people I date. They have their own agency, they make their own choices. I haven’t changed the way I interact with my in-laws, but my husband also makes it so I don’t have to. He has a better relationship now with his parents than he did before we started dating. I couldn’t be the one to shatter my husband’s image of his parents because they had done that to themselves long before I arrived on the scene. But that also means that they are ready to treat my husband as an adult and by proxy me.

And so my mother-in-law asks my husband if there has been any change with my parents. She occasionally pokes him for more information and pushes him to ask me questions. And when she sees me she sits on her hands and fidgets nonstop. She asks how work is going, what I’m looking forward to, but makes sure to keep her questions specific and avoids the family topic altogether. It wouldn’t take…