We Were Promised Jetpacks

On caregiving, adulthood, and the art of showing up when nothing is figured out

It’s my mom’s 87th birthday. She’s livid about two things: her fractured wrist and a dead cat.

(The dead cat wasn’t hers. It also didn’t fracture her wrist. These are separate incidents.)

The wrist is bird-related. She was standing on a step-stool, trimming low-hanging branches, when a flock of migrating geese flew over her head. She lost her balance, went down, and ended up in the E.R. with a cast. Now the cast is keeping her up at night. Also, she wants me to book a second round of X-rays because her butt has started hurting more than her wrist, and she’s convinced she fractured her lower spine.

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

I nod — half-listening, half-fumbling through Kaiser’s website, trying to find the link that bypasses the screening questionnaire I already filled out 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.”

She used to feed a bunch of strays through the backyard screen door — tossing leftover scraps the same way you feed monkeys at the zoo. That flat, matter-of-fact Chinese sorrow. Always understated. Always faintly scolding, like grief is acceptable so long as you don’t make a big thing of it.

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 to lunch. Celebrate 87 years of surviving everything life threw at her. Smile through it.

Instead, I spent most of the morning troubleshooting her Kaiser login, cold-calling radiology clinics that might take her not-quite-Medicare insurance, and trying to determine whether she had actually fractured her spine or whether it just “felt like it.” (These are, medically speaking, very different situations. She did not see the distinction.)

At Din Ding — her favorite, the one she’s been going to long enough that the staff probably has opinions about our family — we ordered zhajianmian, stir-fried pea shoots, and a beef claypot dish that arrived, conspicuously, in no clay pot whatsoever. She picked at everything, then slid most of it across the table to me. “Too salty,” she said.

I stopped taking that personally years ago.

She told me about the cat again. The one that died on her side of the property line. The one she didn’t know but felt obscurely responsible for anyway. “I think it came back to die,” she said, with the quiet certainty of someone who has settled this question for herself.

Sitting there, chopsticks in hand, I realized this wasn’t a one-off day. This was just the schedule now. Fractured wrist, possible fractured spine, unclaimed dead cat, and a very specific kind of grief that keeps getting rerouted through complaints about sodium levels and whatever the thermostat is doing.

Half logistics coordinator. Half emotional translator — fluent in a dialect where “the food is too salty” means something else entirely.

III. The Nice Chinese Man

The house is falling apart in small, steady ways. Every couple of years, she calls “a nice Chinese man” to patch 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 standard feature of aging homeownership.

“We’ve talked about this,” I tell her. “We should fix this properly.”

She waves me off: “Fixing it properly could cost tens of thousands. And it all went to your father’s facility.”

She doesn’t say the rest. I hear it anyway: And from the job you don’t have at the moment.

I bitch about this to the new friends I’ve made since moving back to Fremont. They snap into action like they’ve been training for this exact moment. One asks if I’ve tried Rid-X. I tell him I’ve never heard of Rid-X. They all stare at me like I failed a core module at Adulting School.

In my defense: one of them literally builds homes for a living. He helped me patch drywall. I helped him file his taxes. Stereotypes are gonna stereotype.

IV: The Grace of Showing Up Anyway

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

Just this: I showed up. I bought the lunch. Scheduled the X-rays. Listened to the story about the cat — again. Googled septic tank maintenance at midnight like a person who has their life together.

I didn’t fix anything. Not really. But I was there.

Maybe that’s what adulthood actually looks like: presence, over clarity or completion. Showing up again and again while the people around you age, forget, disappear, or quietly come apart at the seams. You show up. They hand you another thing to carry. You carry it.

We all thought there’d be more to it. A script. A jetpack. Some kind of receipt that says good job, here’s your reward.

Instead, you get this: a life held together with borrowed tools, half-solutions, and the occasional claypot dish that arrives without the claypot. A house, one plumbing mystery away from disaster, but still standing. A fragile little grace you didn’t earn so much as stumble into — somewhere between the drywall and the tax returns and the cat that died on the wrong side of the fence.

It’s not what anyone ordered. But here we are.