We Were Promised Jetpacks

Instead, I got dead cats, Kaiser logins, a broken septic tank, and the honor of being 47 and still guessing.

It’s my mom’s 87th birthday, and she’s livid about her fractured wrist and a dead cat.

(The dead cat wasn’t hers, and it wasn’t responsible for her wrist fracture, just so we’re clear on things.)

The fractured wrist was apparently due to some birds. She was standing on a step-stool trimming some low-hanging tree branches when a flock of migrating geese sailed over her head. She lost her balance, and after a trip to the E.R. and a cast, here we are. The cast prevented her from sleeping well, she tells me. She also asks if I can book a second set of X-rays because now her butt hurts more than her wrist, and she’s convinced she’s fractured her lower spine.

I suggest Tylenol.
She winces: “All the medication makes my stomach upset.”

I nod, half-listening, half-fumbling for the right link on Kaiser’s website that will let me bypass the screening questionnaire I already took for her. She’s scrolling through photos on her iPad.

A cat she didn’t know has died.
“I didn’t know if I should handle the cat or the neighbor,” she says. “But I don’t talk to them, and technically, the cat died on my side of the property.”

There are a bunch of cats she used to feed her leftover scraps to—she would toss the food through the backyard screen door the same way you feed monkeys at the zoo. That flat, matter-of-fact Chinese sorrow. Always understated. Always a little scolding, like grief is fine so long as you don’t get too emotional about it.

There’s something surreal about managing X-rays, dead cats, and zoning disputes over grief—all before lunch.

But that’s adulthood now, isn’t it?
It’s not the triumphant, know-what-you’re-doing version we were sold.

It’s this: trying to help your 87-year-old mother navigate her pain (both physical and otherwise), while also dodging emotional landmines and logging into a healthcare portal that thinks you’re her.

No one tells you when the roles will reverse.

They just do.

One day, you’re the kid being told what to do, and the next, you’re quietly Googling “does Medicare cover in-home help” while your mom rails against the cleaning lady who broke the oven range deep-cleaning it five years ago.

I. We Were Promised Jetpacks (or at least Clarity)

This isn’t what adulthood was supposed to look like.

I don’t mean the caretaking—that part, I expected would come eventually.
I mean the confusion. The improvisation. The sheer volume of guessing.

At 47, I thought I’d be settled by now.

Twenty years ago, I assumed this would be the age where things would finally click—where I’d be mentoring someone else, offering the wisdom I’d accumulated from my own figured-out life.

Instead, I’m cycling through job boards, managing low-grade family resentment, and buying $88 worth of Chinese food, hoping it might temporarily halt the spiral.

We were raised on a narrative: work hard, make smart choices, and adulthood will start to make sense.
My parents had a script. It wasn’t perfect and my parents were certainly not happy—but the script was legible. Easy to follow.

Me? I’ve got vibes, a Kaiser login, and a mom who thinks the government should just send people to help her clean the house.

II. Case Study: My Mother’s Birthday as a Microcosm of Everything

It was supposed to be simple.
Take her out to lunch. Celebrate her 87th. Smile through it.

Instead, I spent most of the morning troubleshooting her Kaiser login, looking for a radiology clinic that takes her not-quite-Medicare insurance, and wondering if she had actually fractured her spine or if it just “felt like it.”

At the restaurant—Din Ding, her favorite Chinese place—we ordered zhajianmian, stir-fried pea shoots, this beef claypot dish that most certainly did NOT come delivered in a clay pot. She picked at the food, then gave most of it to me. “Too salty,” she said. I nodded. I had stopped taking it personally years ago.

She told me about the cat again.
The one that died on her side of the sidewalk.
The one she didn’t know, but still felt vaguely responsible for.
“I think it came back to die,” she said, as if that explained everything.

And maybe it did.
Because somehow, in the middle of lunch, I realized this wasn’t a one-off. This—this—was the new normal.

A fractured wrist, maybe a fractured spine, an unclaimed dead cat, and a very specific kind of sadness that keeps getting rerouted through complaints about food, neighbors, and the thermostat.

This is what caregiving looks like when you’re not quite ready, and when they’re not quite asking for it.
This is adulthood now: half logistical manager, half emotional interpreter.
Somehow… somehow I expected more people to be here, too.

III. The Trifecta (and the Truth Beneath It)

If modern adulthood is a game, I’m playing it on hard mode—with three glitchy controls:
Tech, Family, and Relationships.

Tech was supposed to be the upgrade. Instead, it’s a second job.
I troubleshoot Kaiser logins and squint at broken brightness settings while my mom tells me her screen isn’t working, her wrist still hurts, and “the cat died on our side of the fence.”
None of it is ever just what it is.
“Can you fix this?” really means: I’m scared. I’m getting older. I don’t know how to live like this anymore.

Family is… not Cold War. It’s just sad.
My sister has been missing for over a year.
My mother hasn’t brought it up in months.
It’s a kind of shared denial we’ve wordlessly agreed to maintain.

My father, meanwhile, is a shell of himself in an assisted living facility two blocks away. She could walk there. She doesn’t.
Instead, she tells me about friends she knew when I was a child—who have now either moved back to Taiwan or quietly disappeared into the ether of old age and forgotten phone numbers.
Her loneliness is real, but her pride is louder.

Relationships? They thin out.
People fade into kids and cities and aging parents of their own.
The ones who remain are tired. We trade memes instead of meals. We delay hangouts for when we’re less overwhelmed. But that day rarely comes.

And then there’s the house.

Her house is falling apart in small, steady ways—like her.
Every couple of years, she calls “a nice Chinese man” to fix a plumbing issue that might actually be a failing septic tank.
“Just maintenance,” she shrugs, as if raw sewage backing up into the shower is a normal part of aging.

“We’ve talked about this,” I tell her.
“Fixing it the right way would cost tens of thousands.”
She waves me off: “It all went to your father’s assisted living facility.”

She doesn’t have to say the rest out loud.
But in my head, I hear it anyway: “And from the job you don’t have at the moment.”

I bitch about this to a new set of friends I’ve made since moving back to Fremont.
Surprisingly, they all chip in like they’ve been training for this exact moment.
One asks if I’ve treated it with Rid-X. Never heard of Rid-X, I say, and they all look at me like I skipped Home Improvement 101 at Adulting School.

In my defense, one of them actually builds homes for a living. He helped me patch drywall.
As a show of thanks, I helped him file his taxes.
What can I say—stereotypes be stereotyping.

IV: The Grace of Showing Up Anyway

There’s no lesson here.
No grand epiphany.
No “and that’s when I realized” moment.

Just this: I showed up.

I bought the lunch. I scheduled the X-rays. I listened to the story about the cat. I googled septic tank maintenance and smiled through dinner and patched drywall and handed out tax advice like it came with my ethnicity.

I didn’t fix anything—not really.
But I was there.

And maybe that’s the shape of adulthood now.
Not clarity. Not completion. Just presence.
Just showing up, again and again, while the people around you age, disappear, forget, or quietly unravel.

We all expected something more than this, once.
A script. A jetpack. At least some kind of reward for doing the right thing.

But what we got instead is something quieter.
A life patched together with help and humor and half-solutions.
A house that holds just enough.
A moment of peace bought with that stupid claypot dish.
A fragile grace—found not in certainty, but in the act of caring anyway.