Some Role Reversal
Weddings, waiting rooms, and what it means to start feeling like the kids are taking care of me!
We just flew home last night after a week on the East Coast, and I’ve been spending the day with jet lag, trying to figure out how to write about these past few days. There was so much happening that when I started to outline this post, I kept feeling there were so many stories nested inside another! There may be some follow-on posts here, but I thought I’d start with an interesting transition that started with a moment of minor panic for me.
An Unexpected Visit to the ER
The morning of our older daughter’s wedding, I woke up in the middle of the night with oozing and spreading blisters on my hands. What started as a minor case of ring rash from the hot weather was becoming really uncomfortable and looking pretty gross. Based on my medical history with chronic disease (CKD and diabetes), I decided it needed to be looked at. I have experience with ordinary viruses like the flu ending up in pneumonia. I’ve just learned after all these years that I need to be extra careful.
So at 4am, I let Marsha know I was going to head to the ER because urgent care didn’t open until 8am, and I didn’t want to miss the wedding later that morning! Unfortunately, the ER was packed. The triage nurse told me that given the backlog, there was no way I was going to make the wedding, so she and her colleague advised me to come back afterwards.
So that was the plan. I was just going to go to the wedding and ride share to urgent care afterwards, hoping to avoid the mess at the ER. As we were getting ready for the wedding to start, I let our daughter (the bride) know my plan, and she insisted on taking charge once the (successful!) wedding and lunch reception ended.
After we all changed out of our wedding attire, our new son-in-law drove me and Marsha first to urgent care, and then, after urgent care referred me back to the ER, he dropped us off there so he could join their out-of-town guests for a small open house at their apartment. Marsha was with me in the waiting room for five hours. At the direction of our daughter, her friend, who also happened to be the wedding officiant, drove over extra clothes for the cold waiting room, phone chargers, and even food. We were well taken care of.
When their guests left, our daughter even offered to join us in the waiting room for moral support. Marsha and I declined, but our daughter’s offer reinforced an important shift I had been feeling all week. We were being so well taken care of by the next generation.
Logistics and Tolerance for Chaos
The week started five days earlier with our son-in-law’s doctoral hooding ceremony. He received his PhD in the same week he got married, which worked out to be convenient because his family was already planning to travel from the UK to attend the graduation festivities. The plan also demonstrated a strong tolerance for chaos on their part. Our daughter, who is also finishing her doctorate, elected to defend her thesis on a different date to better align with the start of her next position as an assistant professor at a state university in August. So she was in the crowd seated with the rest of us, cheering for him, but also taking care of all the spectator logistics for us and the rest of his family. We were well fed, and transportation to all the events was well coordinated the whole week.
Our soon to be son-in-law’s family arrived from the UK at the beginning of the week. In fact, they landed just a couple of hours ahead of us at Newark. In attendance were his parents, his brother and sister-in-law with their young son, and his maternal grandmother. A few days later, his best friend, his paternal grandmother, and her partner made the trip as well. What struck me immediately was how easy it all was for me and Marsha.
We’d already met his immediate family before. Marsha and I had spent a week with our daughter, our future son-in-law, and his parents in an Airbnb in the English countryside two Christmases ago. The six of us played board games, had meals together, and wandered through small adjacent towns in the cold. By the time we were all assembled last week, it felt less like meeting the other family and more like picking up where we left off.
Friends for Life
In the middle of the week, Marsha and I slipped away to New York City for a day. We went to a few stores we don’t have in Portland, including Uniqlo, Mood Fabrics, and the MoMA Design Store. We got a tour of the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters, which is genuinely impressive.
But the highlight for me was spending an evening with two of my closest friends from my time at MIT which is now over 35 years ago! We caught up on where we all are in life, with all the texture of being in our late fifties, including aging parents, relationships, even the early talk of retirement.
The contrast hit me as I reflected on the difference in life stages between us and most of the cohort I was encountering all week. In meeting our daughter’s friends from her undergraduate, graduate, and emerging professional network, the conversations were all about completing education, new jobs, and moving to new places. I suppose that was a different version of where my friends and I were over 30 years ago. And it was fun for me to think about how the people in her life today will still be in her life 30 years from now, just as my old college friends are still so much a part of mine. My MIT friends are, in that sense, the proof of concept.
New Friends Among Parents
One of the more surprising things about the week was the instant community that formed among the parents of their friends who attended. While I had met some of them in the past, I’d expected to simply exchange pleasantries with a few people I’d never met. What I didn’t expect was how quickly we all took to each other. Parents from South Carolina, Alabama, New York, and the UK were technically strangers but also a self-selecting group of people who had children that attended demanding schools and stayed genuinely involved as their children transitioned into “grown ass” adults (as Marsha and I would say…). We, the parents all shared a set of common experiences before we ever met.
Intentionality, and the Kids Investing in Us
What I keep coming back to, though, is how different this feels from my own relationship with my parents at this age. Our daughter and her husband have invested a lot to ensure we get to know the people that now form and shape their community. They engineered that English countryside week specifically so our families could really know each other before their married lives began. They invited their friends’ parents to help them celebrate and made space for them to meet their wider community. They introduced us to their advisors, their colleagues, and the people who matter in their lives. This isn’t obligation. It’s intention. They are curating the village they want around them, and they’re including us in it.
Made by Hand
I haven’t mentioned yet what might be the quiet center of the whole week.
Marsha made our daughter’s wedding dress. It wasn’t her first. She made her own wedding dress at age 28, though she’d be the first to say her skills have come a long way since then. She also made our son-in-law’s tie and pocket square, her own top and skirt, and a matching pocket square for me. And then there were the hair pieces. Marsha incorporated fabric from her own mother’s wedding dress, her own wedding dress, and our daughter’s new dress into hair pieces that both she and her younger sister wore that day. The five of us walked into that wedding visually connected by what Marsha’s hands had made, and our daughter got married with artifacts spanning three generations of her family with her.
And then, later that same night, after we had all changed out of our wedding attire, my son-in-law drove me to urgent care and then to the ER. Just hours earlier, he had worn that Marsha-made tie to get married. He is the kind of person who shows up when it counts, even if the details along the way might feel a bit overwhelming at times.
The Shift: The Kids Are Taking Care of the Parents
Marsha and I sat in that ER waiting room for five hours. At some point, her friend arrived with warm clothes, phone chargers, and food. Our daughter had arranged all of it. Her new husband had driven us there and now her friend, wedding officiant and chosen family member was a part of the support team taking care of us.
As a parent, I’m used to taking care of the kids. Sitting in that waiting room, I found that I could just let things happen. The kids had our backs. We were okay. We were more than okay, we were being looked after by a team of caring people. We received texts from multiple of the newlyweds’ friends and parents. We had others not even having met us offer to sit with us in the waiting area. It was truly remarkable and speaks to the community of people that they have built around them.
The infection turned out to be manageable. I missed a couple of events during the week, including a “welcome” open house for out-of-town guests and a blow-out outdoor laser tag event, but I made it to almost everything that would be considered a headline event, including the hooding, the commencement, the wedding, the big party, the after-party, and even the after-after-party. The ER visit was a blip, medically speaking. I left with two tubes of cream.
(Note: Marsha might agree that getting two tubes of cream was a “win.” Still, she felt a bit cheated by the experience of waiting five hours in rather harsh conditions with little payback. She reflected on the seemingly freezing temperatures in the waiting room, the exposure sitting next to a boy being swabbed in the throat and nose, and being stopped multiple times by the same security officer as if he had never seen her before. She felt like the least the ER staff could do was hook me up to a machine for show, arguing that really any machine would do, with bonus points for a machine that might push me around the hospital for a short spin. Unfortunately for her, there was no such fun. Still, I think she has fully recovered!)
Anyway, while the ER experience was a blip, it didn’t feel like a blip. It felt like something quietly shifting. The week was full of transitions for the newlyweds, including a doctorate, a marriage, and new jobs on the horizon. And I had one of my own. I recognize that the children we raised are now adults, and they are people, who are now taking care of us, too.
It was a good week. Even the parts that weren’t.
AI disclosure: I used AI tools during the drafting and editing process to help clarify structure and language. All ideas, judgments, and final wording are my own.