There is a particular structural experience that most adults in their forties and fifties encounter, on close observation, that the wider cultural register has been considerably slower to name than the underlying experience would warrant. The experience is the small daily inversion of the parent-child relationship that occurs across the period when the parents are entering late life and the adult child is, by structural necessity, beginning to assume the various responsibilities the parents had previously been performing.
The standard cultural framing of this period has tended to focus on the physical decline of the aging parents. The framing addresses the various health concerns, the various practical accommodations, the various medical and logistical considerations that the wider population has been calibrated to engage with. The framing is real. The framing is also, on close examination, considerably less attentive to the structurally more interesting feature of the period than the underlying experience would warrant.
The structurally more interesting feature is not the physical decline itself. The structurally more interesting feature is the small daily inversion of the relationship the adult child has been operating inside since they were a small child. The relationship has been calibrated, across decades, to the configuration in which the parents are the structural authorities and the child is the structural recipient of the authority. The configuration has been operating, in most cases, more or less continuously across the entire span of the adult child’s life. The inversion of the configuration is what most adults in this period are, on close examination, actually experiencing, and the wider register has not given them particularly good vocabulary for it.
What the inversion actually consists of
It is worth being precise about what the inversion consists of, because the wider register has tended to absorb it in vaguer terms than the underlying experience warrants.
The inversion is not, in most cases, the dramatic single event the wider register has been calibrated to expect. The inversion is, more accurately, the slow accumulation across years of small structural transfers of responsibility from the parents to the adult child. The transfers include the various small decisions that had previously been made by the parents and that are now being made by the adult child. The decisions include the choice of which medical specialist to consult, the choice of which financial arrangement to enter into, the choice of how to handle the various practical questions of daily life that the parents had previously been handling on their own.
Each transfer, in itself, is small. Each transfer is, in most cases, made under the standard cultural framing in which the adult child is helping out, the parents are still in charge, and the substantive structure of the relationship remains what it has been. The framing is the structural defense the wider environment has produced to make the inversion bearable for both parties.
What the framing obscures, on close examination, is that the cumulative effect of the small transfers is, across years, the structural inversion of the relationship the framing has been calibrated to preserve. The adult child is, in some real way, making the substantive decisions. The parents are, in some real way, the recipients of the decisions. The configuration is the inverse of what it was, and the framing has, by structural design, been concealing the inversion from both parties’ direct attention.
What the strange weight actually consists of
The structural feature that produces what the wider register has been calling the strange weight of this period is, on close examination, the particular internal experience of being the adult who is now making decisions for the people who used to be making decisions for the adult.
The experience involves, in the adult child, the small ongoing internal recognition that the configuration they have been operating inside for their entire life has, in some real way, inverted. The recognition is not, in most cases, comfortable. The recognition produces, in the adult child, a particular kind of small interior disorientation that the wider register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly good vocabulary to.
The disorientation has, on close examination, several structural sources. The first source is that the adult child’s apparatus has been calibrated, across decades, to treating the parents as the structural authorities. The recalibration of the apparatus to the new configuration requires considerable effort the apparatus has not, by default, been prepared to provide. The apparatus continues, in most cases, to operate on the old configuration in the background, even as the surface activity of the relationship has shifted to the new configuration. The mismatch between the background calibration and the surface activity is what produces the disorientation.
The second source is that the adult child has, by every available measure, not been trained for the new role. The wider environment provides considerable training for the role of being a child of parents. The wider environment provides considerable training for the role of being a parent of children. The wider environment provides almost no training for the role of being the parent of one’s own parents, because the role has, in the wider register’s framing, not been adequately acknowledged as the structural reality it is. The adult child accordingly finds themselves performing the role without any particular preparation, in real time, on the basis of whatever improvisation they are able to produce in the moment.
The third source is that the new configuration produces, in the adult child, the small ongoing experience of grief that the wider register has been considerably slower to name than the underlying experience would warrant. The grief is not, in most cases, calibrated to the parents’ physical decline in itself. The grief is calibrated, more specifically, to the structural disappearance of the configuration the adult child has been operating inside their entire life. The configuration is, in some real way, ending. The ending is happening slowly enough that the adult child cannot, in most cases, attend to the ending as a discrete event. The ending is happening across years, in the small daily transfers of responsibility, and the adult child is, in some real way, conducting a slow and almost invisible grieving process across the entire period of the inversion.
What the parents are doing, on close examination
The structural feature worth attending to, on close examination, is what the parents are doing on the other side of the inversion. The wider register has tended to absorb the parents’ experience as primarily one of physical decline and the various accommodations the decline requires. The accurate framing is more specific.
The parents are, in most cases, conducting their own small ongoing internal recognition of the inversion, in some real way parallel to the recognition the adult child is conducting. The parents have been the structural authorities in the relationship for the entire span of the adult child’s life. The parents are now, on the available evidence of how the inversion actually unfolds, in the structural position of receiving authority from someone they have spent decades training to receive authority from them. The position is uncomfortable. The position is, in most cases, not articulated by the parents to the adult child, because the articulation would require the parents to acknowledge the inversion they have been operating under without quite naming.
The parents accordingly perform, in many cases, a particular small ongoing resistance to the inversion that the adult child is, on close examination, almost always misreading. The adult child registers the resistance as stubbornness, denial, or the difficulty of working with the aging parent. The accurate reading is that the resistance is, more specifically, the parents’ small ongoing attempt to preserve the configuration they have been operating inside for decades. The attempt is failing. The attempt is, by structural design, going to continue failing. The failing is what the inversion consists of. The recognizing of this on the adult child’s part is what allows the adult child to extend to the parents the same epistemic courtesy the adult child would extend to any other adult who was, in real time, losing the structural position they had been occupying for their entire life.
What the practice of inhabiting the inversion well actually involves
The practice that adult children who navigate this period well have, on close examination, developed is the small daily work of acknowledging the inversion to themselves while continuing to extend, to the parents, the structural respect that the previous configuration had been calibrated to.
The acknowledgment is small. The acknowledgment involves, in selected moments, the adult child’s small implicit recognition that the configuration has, in some real way, inverted, and that the decisions being made are, on close examination, theirs to make. The recognition produces, in the adult child, the structural permission to actually make the decisions rather than continuing to operate on the framing in which the parents are still in charge. The making of the decisions is the new role. The new role is what the adult child has been, in some real way, trained to perform without realizing they were being trained for it across the entire period of the inversion.
The respect involves, simultaneously, the small ongoing practice of treating the parents as the adults they still are, regardless of the structural inversion. The parents have, on the available evidence of how aging actually proceeds, considerable substantive interior life that the inversion does not, in itself, change. The parents continue to be particular adults with particular preferences, particular forms of expertise, particular features of who they have been across their entire lives. The respect involves the small daily refusal to allow the inversion to reduce the parents to the receiving role they have, by structural necessity, started to occupy. The refusal preserves, in some real way, the parents’ substantive presence in the relationship even as the structural configuration has inverted.
The combination of the acknowledgment and the respect is what most of the visible competence in adult children who navigate this period well is, on close examination, the structural product of. The acknowledgment allows the adult child to perform the new role. The respect allows the parents to remain substantively present in the relationship. The combination produces, in the relationship between the adult child and the aging parents, the structural condition in which both parties are able to navigate the inversion with considerably more grace than the wider register has tended to credit as possible.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The hardest part of watching one’s parents age is, on close examination, not the physical decline itself. The hardest part is, more specifically, the slow daily inversion of the relationship the adult child has been operating inside for their entire life, and the strange weight of becoming the structural parent of the people who used to be the structural parents of the adult child.
The inversion is real. The inversion is, on the available evidence, considerably more consequential than the wider cultural register has been treating it as. The wider register has been calibrated to the physical accommodations the period requires, while the underlying structural transformation has been considerably less named than the underlying experience would warrant.
The naming is the first piece of work. The work that follows is the small daily practice of inhabiting the inversion well, which involves the acknowledgment of the new configuration alongside the ongoing respect for the substantive presence the parents still bring to the relationship. The practice is small. The practice is, in some real way, what most of the visible competence of adult children who navigate this period well is structurally produced by. The wider register would benefit, on the available evidence, from absorbing this with considerably more seriousness than it has so far. The absorbing, modestly, is what articles like this one are calibrated to begin.
