Figuring Out How to Help When Your Parents are Helpless

by Megan Reynolds

My mother has had the same job since I graduated from high school. She works as the international student coordinator at a junior college in California, a job that consists of presiding over a swarm of students from overseas, helping them get settled into life in America, dealing with immigration paperwork, finding them apartments, and being a stand-in for their mothers that they left behind.

For a woman who would deny any traces of empty nest syndrome, this is the perfect role. Her children have grown up and fled to the East Coast, and while she is loath to admit that she misses us, it is clear that she does. All the maternal, meddling, nagging energy she possesses boils over and manifests in picked fights with my stepfather or particularly savage sessions at the gym, unless diverted otherwise. She runs half marathons regularly. She drives a minivan that is too big for her, and drives it poorly. The job she has is perfect for her.

For a long time, she had ruled the roost, commanding students who dutifully bring her presents, help her with her work and make sure she has plenty to eat. In kind, she is an exceedingly capable coordinator. She coordinates their feelings. She is a fierce advocate for a group of people new to a country where things are different, because she is working out of a deep well of experience of being new here, too. She runs interference between them and INS, makes sure their paperwork is in order and helps them find places to live. There is no doubt in my mind that she is excellent at her job. Her new boss — a sour woman who I know very little about except that she seems to hate my mother — is ruining her life.

The last time my mother was in town, she was visiting to run another half-marathon. Normally, we don’t talk about work. Our conversations are limited mostly to mutual complaints and pointed inquiries as to whether or not any of my other sisters are in the room to talk on the phone as well. This visit, things were different. She had a thumb drive with her. “I need your help with this handbook,” she told me. “It’s for work.” What followed was a tense afternoon of editing an unwieldy Word document full of red flags and edits so passive aggressive and demeaning that I wanted to get on an airplane and punch the author in the face.

A week after she got back to California, we spoke on the phone, and she sounded distressed. Her boss had intensified her campaign to push my mother out: She said my mother was incompetent. She told her that she was not good at her job. She insinuated that, because her emails are written in “poor” English, she shouldn’t be allowed to send them. Her lack of technical aptitude with the Microsoft Office Suite — something that many people lie about on their resumes — is grounds for dismissal. Her anger, an emotion I am used to hearing, had crossed the line into melancholy. She sounded on the verge of tears. I have never seen my mother cry.

My mother spent a good portion of her career feeling empowered by the work she was doing. I soon learned that the amount of complaints she lodged about the nature of the work she was doing were harmless. I like to complain about work. It is a passion of mine, sitting somewhere alongside reading quietly in bed and watching “Pretty Little Liars.” Like most things I do, I got it from my mother. Because I’m intimately familiar with the nature of her complaints, I was able to parse out what was actually viable. My mother sounded absolutely miserable and here was nothing I could do about it.

Hearing your parents at their most helpless is traumatizing and renders you helpless too. From 3,000 miles away, sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, there was very little that I could actually do. I listened to her nearly break down and tried not to cry. I told her that she was good at her job, and that she has to find a way through this. I told her I would help her in any way that I could. The only thing I wanted to do was to call her boss and tell her what a good person my mother is, and how helpful she is to these students. I wanted to tell her that she was completely incapable of understanding the work that this occasionally surly spitfire of a woman had put in to make sure that the kids coming in from overseas had places to live. I wanted her to understand that my mother’s own experience with immigration in the not-so-distant past is her greatest asset. I wanted this woman to see how much I believed in my mother. I know she can handle her job and its demands, but she buckles when someone takes shots at her pride.

Recently, I called my mom to talk about her troubles. When I asked her how things were going, she made a vague reference to the Cultural Revolution, and then made the same empty-ish threats about leaving the country and moving back to Taiwan. She told me that because of the union that she belongs to, they side with management.

“They don’t do a diddle for me,” she said, as she banged pots and pans around in the kitchen. “They’re trying to push me out.” The next day, she sent me her resume, and followed up with a text that read “Pls check my resume I sent today. Please do so before the weekend ends. I am trying to survive under a tyrant.”

Megan Reynolds lives in New York.

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