I was talking to a woman who works for a neighboring department, and she said she really missed her adult son.
“Oh, where is he?” I asked.
“He lives two blocks away from us,” she said and explained the exact position of the houses in respect to each other.
“So what happened?” I asked, thinking there had to be some serious conflict.
“Nothing,” the woman said. “We are just so busy with our lives. He’s busy with his family.”
Another woman standing nearby piped up with a similar story about her adult children.
This strikes me as very American and very bizarre. For the life of me, I don’t understand this absolute desperation to sever all contact with one’s children the moment they turn 18.
These two women are support staff. They aren’t college-educated. With my professor friends, it’s not as bad but they pretend it is. One friend tried to conceal that her adult daughter moved in with them in the summer between college and nursing school. It took me weeks to pry it out of her. She thought I’d decide her daughter was a loser if I knew about it.
I had a very profound relationship with my father until the day he died. He knew everything about my writing, what stage each article was, the names of all my colleagues and the details of their lives. We talked every day for long stretches of time. And none of this prevented me from having my own life or made me a loser. To the contrary, it made my life enormously better.
I just don’t get how you live two minutes away from your relatives and you are too busy to see them. Busy doing what, exactly? What do people do? My sister comes with the kids to live with us for two months every summer. I go over to stay with her in Canada every time I can. How come we aren’t too busy? I know every detail of her life, the names of all her friends and colleagues, everything. I know what my mother ate for breakfast yesterday. And the day before. She’s a very difficult person but we talk. Every day. For at least an hour. And before her sisters moved in with her last September, they talked on Skype several times a day. I don’t get how people are too busy for all this.
This is a cultural thing I’ll never understand.
Clarissa's Blog 
This post moved me to tears – not exactly sure why, but thank you.
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“He’s busy with his family”
My intepretation: It sounds a little bit like a humble brag.
Just as performance of manhood requires paid labor in a way that performance of womanhood doesn’t, American adulthood is about performative independence and engagement (being busy).
She’s not necessarily happy about not seeing her son more but the fact that he’s started a family and is busy with that and doesn’t need to check in with her all the time is probably something she’s proud of (I also assume she’s exaggerating about not seeing him for effect). She can’t openly brag about her family man son (an achievement in the current socio-economic climate) but she can let people know about her good fortune indirectly.
Same dynamic with your professional friend…. daughter isn’t independent yet and she doesn’t want people to think she’s smothering her (and may not be happy about nursing school…. but that’s a separate issue).
Now if I saw/her her talk about this in person I might change my interpretation but I’ve heard this song before….
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It is truly weird. Not the culture I live in so… ??
Do these people visit anyone else? Like, is their household a little hermit kingdom and they don’t visit parents because they don’t visit anyone– no social life outside the phone? Or do they have their own social life that simply excludes family?
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It is possible their son’s spouse doesn’t like them, hence they are “too busy”. Not everyone’s spouse is as understanding as yours of family ties.
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Watched this happen with one of my cousins. So sad. Parents are the nicest people on earth, and their adult offspring visited often and got along great, until son married a rich girl. Less and less contact after that, particularly after they had kids. The grandkids look like little clones of their maternal gma (I’ve seen her baby pics!), but don’t you dare say that in front of their mother. She gets offended. I feel bad for the kids– they have really amazingly wonderful grandparents (my own kids adore them even though they’re just great-aunt and -uncle and we go out of our way to visit when we’re in the area), but apparently our family is not “the right sort” of people to be influencing her tender-age kids… it’s kind of heartbreaking. Even so, it’s not no contact. Just a lot less.
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*paternal, not maternal
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I don’t understand it either. If you’re very busy…why not have nearby family help you out? The busiest times in my life tends to involve more family time, not less.
Tbh I would say the rush to get kids out when they’re 18 has pretty much died at this point. I know more people my age who lived with their parents in college than who were forced to move out on their 18th birthday. I imagine it was even less common for zoomers.
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That’s really great. I have a friend who didn’t go to her father’s funeral. They didn’t have any conflict, or anything like that. She just didn’t want to bother. This is so bizarre to me that I don’t even know how to process.
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I don’t know how to process that either. I don’t like funerals, but…
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I also found it very bizarre when living in the US. I moved there, then my brother joined, and there were raised eyebrows. Why would I live with my brother when I could rent a room to a stranger? For the life of them, they didn’t get it. I was on Skype with my mom every day, sometimes a couple of times a day. They found it weird as hell. Now that I am back in Spain happily living with my mother, they are pulling their hair out.
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I have a much, much closer relationship with my sister who lives in Canada than most people I know with siblings living in the same area. Our relationship is one of the best things in my life. I truly don’t get why anybody would reject something so wonderful.
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Enabling acts are enabling, and technical hurdles help enable those enabling acts.
What if that guy discovered he likes the family he’s created but not so much the one he was born into?
Wouldn’t you be tempted to insert arbitrary hurdles and enable situations where you don’t have to deal with problematic family members?
Oh, and also, American Boomer families were very much like this, being in general self-focused special snowflakes, so now the younger generations are showing them how much they listened.
And yes, I’ve survived the surgery.
Having to spend time in a medically induced coma because certain pain medications don’t work for me?
Sometime we can talk about the people with CYP2D6 genetic polymorphisms and how they can’t process opioids, but the short version: they have little to no effect, and it’s easy to take too much believing there will be a breakthrough effect.
They only brought me around when they were sure standard NSAIDs would be sufficient for the pain.
Not so sufficient actually, but bearable … and at least now, breakfast! 🙂
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