Living with your Boomer parents when you’re a millennial can be challenging on so many levels. I grew up at a time where living with your parents after the age of 18 meant you were a complete loser unable to cope with the realities of life. But then my health decided to take a dive and here I am going on 35 and still living with my mother and stepfather during an economic depression. I’m not the only one who can’t hack it – I’m one of a majority of adult children, 52% who still live at home in America. And yet that’s not to say it isn’t challenging.
I have no privacy what-so-ever living here so when I decided to get into a relationship with someone living out of state (right before Corona hit) I didn’t exactly feel like sharing all the petty details with my mother. It’s been months, I still haven’t said anything, and she’s bonkers about it. Throws a fit every time I leave to go see him. As such I was expecting the usual drama when I drove back home that night about a month ago… but weirdly she was in a good mood, pretending nothing was amiss. She does that, swinging from one extreme to the other.
And so I was talking with her about other things when a message came in from my stepdad. My step dad was contracted to do one last job before completely retiring. It was a six week job three hours away from home and already it’d been a total bear. He’d injured himself the first day while packing, ended up in the hospital for the ensuing infection and blood clot, and then endured an almost two week long power outage at the hotel while getting absolutely nothing done on the work project due to a clusterfuck. Usually he kept well in communication with my mother but strangely his messages went dark the day before and she hadn’t heard from him. She worried but figured he must just be resting up or simply forgot… but the messages that eventually came over FaceBook that evening as I sat with her made little to no sense. They were English words but did not form a sentence. It was complete Gibberish.
He’d had trouble texting on his phone before and had a habit of leaving a lot of typos but even so you could generally get the idea of what he was saying. This time around I could only grasp one concept out of four sentences. This looked like something someone with a stroke might say.
“What do I do?” My mother asked me.
“Well that’s clearly not normal. He needs to be checked out.”
“How do I get him to go to the hospital?”
“Ask him I guess.”
She called him and talked to him on the phone. If there was any doubt that he had a stroke he erased all of it by talking. He’d say something coherent and then a bunch of gibberish. My mother begged for him to go to the ER. He claimed it was late and he was tired and he already had a doctor’s appointment set up for next week for other reasons. He didn’t want to go. He clearly did not grasp the gravity of the situation. Nearly in tears my mother kept at it until he agreed. She told him to get an Uber or at least ask the guy at the desk to get an Uber. Hand the phone over if he had to. And check back in with her when he got to the hospital.
Now what? Now we wait I guess. I would have just sent a wellness check and had the cop bring him to the ER but I didn’t have enough time to suggest this option before she called him. And so we sat back worried… for hours. We tried texting, messaging, calling, to no avail. We tried calling the hotel but we first didn’t know what the hotel was called and then didn’t know the right number for the desk although we tried all the numbers we found online. We also considered calling the hospital but again we did not know which hospital he would have went to. It was a hopeless situation and worrying at that.
Finally he picked up his phone 3 or 4 hours later. Still not in the right state of mind he’d simply forgotten to check in and now his battery was basically dead. No matter, he was at the hospital and that’s all that mattered for now.
Sure enough he had had a stroke. The doctors took good care of him and checked in on all his other health concerns. They kept him there for several days and kept us updated by 2AM phone calls where they asked all sorts of things we just didn’t have the information on – like what prescriptions he was taking. Meanwhile a pharmacy was calling claiming he hadn’t picked the antibiotics up he needed for his injury two weeks ago – something he insisted up and down he did not need.
My mother is not good in these sort of stressful situations. So I stayed upstairs and slept on the couch giving her the information I could Google – the hotel name, the hospital name, numbers, and what-have-you. I also slept up there so I could overhear the 2AM phone calls from the hospital and make sure she said what she needed to say. It sounds helicopter-like but I’ve done this sort of thing before and it’s a needed service. I’m just better at staying cool and level headed. Not to mention more savvy with the computer.
We had no idea if we could visit him during this covid pandemic but we knew we had to retrieve his belongings from the hotel before his stay there was supposed to be up and so on that note I offered to drive. The only catch was my mother would be in charge of driving my step dad’s car home. My mother. Who never leaves town because intersections are too much for her. Had to drive home from Danbury Connecticut which is a part of NYC’s greater metropolitan area with a population of 80,000. I was worried to say the least.
An hour into driving we got a phone call from my step dad saying he was being released. Perfect timing! Still the journey down there was a bit nerve wracking for me. Four and five lane highways with exits on both sides and quick traffic as far as the eye could see. It made fuck-ups all too easy but I managed. Until we got to the hospital. All the hospitals in Danbury are called Danbury Hospital so where he was exactly I had no idea. We went back to the ER to ask as only one of these hospitals had an ER. The ER tweaked out on us before giving us directions… take a left, wander past the car garage, and the rest of the hospital is right there. Of course I had to miss the entrance and the GPS had to argue by dragging me down some other street that had nothing to do with anything.
By now my mother is on the phone with my stepdad and BOTH of them are trying to direct me somewhere and I am so stressed out over their squabbling and suggestions I am running over curbs and giving local nurses the impression I am drunk out of my mind. I was not. FINALLY found the fucking entrance and drove up. It was only then we learned we would have to go pick up his car at the ER because he drove himself there. Thank god it was only 3 or 4 blocks!! My mother was not happy and he didn’t want to start arguing.
We were happy to find he was mostly coherent by now. That was always a worry. Off we went to the hotel to pack up. Apparently while my step dad was in a stroke induced haze he had wandered to the local super market and bought a package of GIANT Danishes and a steak that I am pretty certain was half a goddamn cow. He was not supposed to be eating this but this is the most him thing he could have ever done in this altered mental state. Brain shutting down? English going bye bye? Let’s get food. A ridiculous amount of bad-for-you food.
We slept at the hotel that night and drove the three hours back in the morning. I drove behind my mother and made sure she took the right exits from behind. At one point she tried turning into the break down lane and then back out almost slamming into a car. That’s when I caught up with her and decided not to let her out of my eye sight. From here she tried to not take every exit she needed to. I ended up changing lanes just to get her attention three or four times. BUT WE MADE IT.
I may have a few less years on my life after this… but I am content it worked out as well as it did considering. He’s recovering well, my mother is learning how to be a better personal assistant making sure he takes all the meds he needs. And I have continued to disappear from time to time to spend with my beau. (And no, it hasn’t caused any less drama back home.)
So ends this crazy adventure.
**All photos taken by myself, Theophanes Avery, in various locations.