When Your Parent’s Retirement Plan Is You
By: Janice Bae
Tags: Retirement, Life, Aging, Family, Culture

When I graduated high school I eagerly set about my plans for a new life hundreds of miles away. I was going to go away to college, something I had worked towards with excruciating effort because, to be frank, I kind of never wanted to see my parents again.

I’ve spoken before about the abuse I went through growing up as a child. The sole focus in my mind when I even applied to colleges was to apply to the ones that were as far away as possible. It was as if my body knew to instinctively put as much distance as I could between myself and the scene of the crime.

It’s been a wild ride since I left home. I had a baby, went to college, got married, got divorced, and have had a variety of careers and experiences. I tried to see my parents as little as possible during this time. And when I came back to my hometown a decade later as a changed woman, the first thing I noticed was how my parents had aged considerably in the time I was gone.

I was a completely different person, and yet I subconsciously expected my parents to be just as I had left them. In the decade’s worth of time during which I had so rarely seen them, the picture of them in my mind stood frozen in time.

It seems like most people have a moment in time when they have to deal with the reality that their parents are aging. There’s a certain anxiety that accompanies realizations of your parents’ mortality — and for people who haven’t figured out their own lives yet, this anxiety can turn into abject fear.

My parents are very poorly equipped to face what should be their “golden years.” They’re immigrants, they never learned English, they don’t have any retirement funds saved up, and they seem to be struggling to even stay up on the bills lately (especially now that the pandemic has been raging for so long).

Though my relationship with them is strained, if I had the money, I wouldn’t hesitate at all to throw money at a problem that so clearly needed it. The problem is, I have no money.

I have “money” but I don’t have “money money” — money that’s sufficient to support multiple generations of humans in one family. I was barely getting by supporting myself and my daughter before this and it was a large part of the reason why I moved back to my hometown. Being a single parent in a pandemic when schools have been shut down is pretty much a recipe for disaster. Being the sole caretaker of a child was barely manageable before any virus made it’s way to the United States. The thought of having to support my parents when I’ve never actually experienced full financial stability is dizzying.

“So this is how whole families become homeless,” is a recurring thought that keeps coming to mind.

What was supposed to be a sort of sabbatical to come back to my hometown, get well again, start a new career, and regain more control over my life has turned into anxieties regarding what my parents’ plans are for the immediate future. I feel exhausted because it feels like my fight-or-flight response is on all the time; I’m constantly weighing the pros and cons of fleeing to a new city and a new life before my parents fully realize that they truly can’t live without me.

Right now there seems to be some sort of unspoken agreement that I’ll be here to weather the storm with them. But this isn't where I imagined myself, this isn’t how I imagined myself living or raising my daughter.

I do feel the sense that I’m being selfish sometimes. In Asian cultures like mine, filial piety — the virtue of respecting and revering one’s parents or elders — is a strong undercurrent that flows just beneath all familial interactions. It defines the relationships that parents have with their children. But just as my relationship with them disintegrated over the first eighteen years of my life, so did the filial piety. There’s something inside me that tells me that a sense of duty to my abusers is just setting myself up for failure and likewise for my daughter who has to live with the boundaries I create for our lives.

There’s also the paradox that filial piety creates when it comes time for parents to rely on their children — the paradox of being put into a position of great responsibility but still being treated like a child. Filial piety says that a parent’s wisdom is to be respected above all and this idea can create resentment for the adult children who find themselves in positions of authority in their multigenerational households without being given the proper respect and trust that should accompany this responsibility.

I never imagined that I would be having these worries in the situation that I’m in now. I thought I’d be older. I thought that I’d have a life partner to help me make decisions by the time I would need to deal with these issues. I thought I would be settled in a career. The struggle to find my way of life was supposed to be long over by the time any of this was supposed to happen — but I was wrong on all counts.

I’m working through a lot of resentment now — the resentment at myself for not being prepared for this and the resentment at my parents for letting themselves fall into a situation like this. It’s a lonely place to be.

When I read advice online about this problem it seems so straightforward. I find myself nodding and muttering to myself, “Of course, this makes perfect sense.” Millennial money coach Tori Dunlap says: “You have to put your oxygen mask on before you can put anybody else’s on. Especially right now when we’re talking about really difficult financial times for a lot of people, you really need to make sure that your own finances are as good as they can be before taking care of others. That’s not selfish in any way.”

But oh, if it were only that simple. I feel like I don’t have an oxygen mask of my own right now, and sometimes it feels selfish to want to give up on looking for it.