My mum called me last week and casually mentioned she’d sorted out an issue with her internet. Described the whole process. Step by step. Very detailed. Too detailed.
She was performing.
I know this because I used to do the same thing. When I first moved overseas, every phone call home was a carefully constructed presentation of competence. I’m doing great. Everything’s under control. The apartment’s sorted, the work’s going well, I’ve figured out the banking system. Every word was true and none of it was the whole truth. I was terrified and lonely and eating instant noodles at 2am, but the version I sent home was the version that didn’t worry anyone.
Now I’m watching my parents do the same thing in reverse. And the specific pain of it isn’t that they’re getting older. It’s that I can see the performance, because I invented it.
The information control nobody talks about
A pilot study published in the journal Innovation in Aging explored how aging parents manage information during the role reversal period with their adult children. The researchers found that parents strategically control what they disclose, withholding information about medication use, new physical symptoms, financial decisions, and end-of-life planning.
The reasons they gave were striking. Parents didn’t hide these things out of confusion or forgetfulness. They did it to maintain autonomy. They managed information deliberately to avoid becoming a caregiving burden and to preserve their sense of independence.
In other words, they were performing. Not randomly, but strategically. The same way their adult children once performed adulthood to prove they could handle being on their own, aging parents perform competence to prove they don’t need to be handled.
Why this particular pain is so hard to name
Research published in the Journal of Adult Development found that when older parents begin to experience age-related functional limitations, adult children naturally start to monitor and try to control their parents’ behaviour. But the study also identified something crucial: parents prioritize autonomy and self-sufficiency, while adult children prioritize safety. That mismatch creates a tension that neither side knows how to address.
The parent insists they’re fine. The adult child can see they’re not. And both of them know the other knows. But naming it would mean crossing a line that neither is ready to cross, because naming it makes it real. It turns “mum’s a bit slower these days” into “mum needs help,” and “needs help” sits dangerously close to “can’t cope,” which sits dangerously close to something neither of you wants to say out loud.
So instead, you both perform. Your parent performs competence. You perform not noticing. And the space between those two performances is where all the grief lives.
The mirror nobody asked for
Here’s what makes this different from ordinary worry about aging parents. It’s the recognition. When you watch your parent carefully narrate how they handled something that used to be effortless, you’re watching your own playbook. You know exactly what that performance is, because you built the same one when you were twenty-two and pretending you hadn’t cried in the supermarket because you couldn’t find anything familiar.
The performance of competence is a love language. It says: I don’t want you to worry about me. I want you to believe I’m okay so that you can be okay. Your parents did it for their parents. You did it for yours. And now yours are doing it for you, one more time.
The difference is that when you were performing at twenty-two, time was on your side. The performance would eventually become real. You would figure out the banking system. You would stop eating noodles at 2am. The gap between the act and the reality would close.
With aging parents, the gap only widens. And both of you know that too.
What the research says about how parents experience this
Research on aging and intergenerational relationships consistently shows that the desire for autonomy doesn’t diminish with age. If anything, it intensifies. A review of Research on Aging findings found that help from adult children was experienced as a mixed blessing by aging parents, who struggled between wanting independence and appreciating connection. Parents preferred help that was voluntary and rooted in affection rather than duty or concern.
That distinction matters enormously. A parent can accept “I’m coming over because I want to see you” far more easily than “I’m coming over because I’m worried about you.” The first preserves their dignity. The second confirms their decline. And for a generation that built their identity around being capable, competent, and self-sufficient, the second feels like a verdict.
The mutual pretending
What nobody prepares you for is that watching your parents age is an exercise in collaborative fiction. You both agree, without ever discussing it, to maintain a version of reality where everything is fine. Where mum can handle the internet. Where dad’s driving is perfectly safe. Where nobody needs to have the conversation.
This isn’t denial, exactly. It’s closer to what attachment theory would predict: both parties are managing their emotional proximity to a painful truth. The parent avoids disclosure to prevent becoming a burden. The adult child avoids pressing to preserve the parent’s dignity. Both are protecting each other. Both are alone inside the protection.
I find this unbearably tender. Two people who love each other, carefully constructing a fiction that allows the relationship to continue without either one having to say: this is changing and I’m scared.
What I’m learning about sitting with it
I don’t have a solution for this. I don’t think there is one. But I’ve been thinking about it through the lens of something I’ve studied for years in Buddhist philosophy: the practice of being present with impermanence without trying to fix it or narrate it away.
I wrote about this in my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego. One of the hardest Buddhist concepts to actually live, not just understand intellectually, is the idea that everything you love is temporary, and that accepting this doesn’t diminish the love. It deepens it. Because you stop holding the relationship to a standard of permanence it was never going to meet, and you start being present with it as it actually is. Right now. Today.
My mum fixed her internet. She told me about it in great detail. I said, “That’s impressive, Mum.” She said, “Well, I’m not completely useless yet.” And we both laughed, and inside the laugh was everything neither of us said.
That’s the performance. That’s the grief. And for now, that’s also the love.
It just doesn’t look the way I thought it would.
