When Did Our Parents Start Getting Older?

You know what I realized recently? When we’re growing up, our parents don’t really have an exact age. I obviously understood that my Nana or my friends' parents had birthdays and got older every year, but regardless of that, they all existed in this category simply called “adults”. Whether they were 35, 55, or 75, an adult's age wasn’t particularly meaningful to me. It’s almost as if adults had been adults forever.

Fast forward, and it’s weird that I’m starting to become the age that I remember some of them being. Sadly, the weirdness didn’t stop there as I’m also realizing that they are still getting older. This has become much more apparent in my mind ever since moving away from Canada 10 years ago. Thinking about it, when you see somebody every day, aging is almost invisible to us. The changes in their skin, the way they walk, or their behaviour are too gradual to notice. When you live thousands of miles away? Time moves differently. I leave one version of someone and return months later to a slightly different one.

Yes, the changes may be tiny still and most of the time nothing dramatic has happened, but the slight differences start to add together. Whether someone is getting tired a little earlier than usual, there’s a little more grey hair than I remember them having, or even simple tasks take just a bit longer than they used to with them. More noticeable are the conversations that involve topics like medications, doctors, retirement, or something else I only associated with getting older (even though I’m starting to have the same conversations myself).

We Assume There Will Always Be Another Visit

This can apply to friends too, but I find a lot of us make it easy to postpone visiting family because they feel permanent to us. Friends drift apart, relationships end, jobs disappear, but family always seems like it’ll be there. We all do it, it’s the “we should do that next time!” type of sayings that we use with each other, but then months become years remarkably easily and all of a sudden there isn’t as much time as you’d think.

Look at my own family… we finally did our first ‘sibling day’ in August which had never happened before despite all of us having lived together for decades at this point. Niagara Falls has also been there, even longer I may add, yet it somehow took until now for us to finally organize a day and actually do it. I think that’s what made me realize how many experiences we assume will happen just because the people involved have always been present in our lives.

Eventually is an incredibly convenient thought that doesn’t require a calendar event. The problem? It’s not promised.

I will stop here for a second and say that while I realize that talking about aging parents or friends can very quickly turn into a heavy, grief-driven essay, I also don’t want to focus on the negatives too much as it’s a miserable way to capture the experience that I am trying to appreciate (and possibly get you to as well). Worrying about losing somebody doesn’t give us more time with them, and if anything, it steals attention from the time that already exists. So let’s be less dramatic and view it from this angle instead: Why don’t we simply stop behaving like our opportunities to see or hang out with friends & family are unlimited?

If you want to have dinner with your family, make a trip with your friends, ask someone about their life, or even just sit outside chatting for 4 hours staring at corn with a cup of coffee, then you should probably do these things while they remain possible instead of assuming that the opportunity will be there next time, waiting patiently for you to take advantage of it.

Our Relationship Changes as We Get Older Too

There’s another side of watching our parents get older that I don’t think is spoken about enough as well; we are also changing at the same time. At some point in our life, the relationship we have with our parents gradually becomes more equal. We’ll start hearing stories that we were too young to understand before. We learn about the mistakes, fears, sacrifices, relationships, and all the decisions that went into these events and shaped the adults who raised us. Even more, we start to realize that they were figuring out things too (hence the name unofficial guide to being an adult).

I made this discovery back in 2014 when I started this blog, but the realization has grown since then. I’ve really come to understand that my Nana, Cliff & Janis, and other parental figures in my life were not handed an instruction manual like I thought they were. At one point in their own lives, they were my age dealing with their own careers, relationships, money, children and uncertainty. What’s great about this though is that this realization creates a different kind of relationship with them if you allow it. You’ll stop seeing this person as your parent, and begin understanding their full identity of who they were before we existed, and how we impacted who they became today. That also opens up questions that are probably worth asking while we still have the time to hear the answers. For me, I feel like I didn’t get enough time with my Nana and still have a million questions I’d love to ask her, but can’t. It’s something that I live with every day, and it’s not easy, so that’s why I implore you to really take advantage of the time you still have with your parents or other older family members (if you do).

Make the Memory While Everyone Is Still Here

That doesn’t mean that every single event is going to be one for the history books. I don’t know if our Niagara Falls trip will become a legendary story we tell over & over, or if it’ll just be a nice day that we all remember. Regardless, the memory of it is enough and what matters most is that we actually did it. Nobody needed to have a major birthday, wedding, funeral, or some sort of emergency that made us all come together. We just decided that spending the day together was worth organizing, and made it happen.

I want more of those days.

It’s not because I think there won’t be another “we’ll do it next time”, because most of the time there will be another next time. Until there isn’t, and I don’t want that realization to haunt me in the future. I’d rather it make me a little better at using the time we have to be more present.