By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

Today I emptied a storage unit, signed a sale contract over e-doc, and oversaw an estimate on the imminent transfer of two step-stools, 15 pots, one couch, seven tables, and an easy chair. These sundry items will move from my parents’ apartment to the homes of my four grown sons. Somehow, almost imperceptibly, I moved up the responsibility chain. Odd isn’t it that at age 57, I had wanted nothing more than to stay put.

In the past, I would have been fighting to advance. When my son was born 28 years ago, I remember being upset because in the family line-up, nothing seemed to change. Even though I now had someone to diaper, it was like I was relegated to being the sitcom kid forever.

My grandmother still got to be called “Grandma Rose”. My mother continued to behave like a benevolent despot around the holidays, assigning the making of jello molds and mandelbrot. She had no compunction about airing her displeasure when I insisted that, at a mere 10 months, my son give up his bottle and drink from a stupid plastic cup.

With my husband working about 100 hours a week, my dad prevailed over the burnt-out bulbs and recalcitrant outlets in my tiny new house. When we went somewhere together, my parents drove. I sat in the back next to my son in his car seat. Touché. For a long time if I had a question, any question at all, I was convinced my parents had the answer. And often they did. Because my parents were so competent and so forceful, I stayed everybody’s little girl.

At some point, weren’t we all supposed to catapult forward a generation? In retrospect, I was way more anxious than I should have been for the shift to occur. And now that it has, it is uncomfortably seismic.

Today my parents mostly watched the dismantling of their last owned home, occasionally interjecting some unhelpful nugget. I refer specifically to my dad’s conviction that anything affixed to the wall like the television sets was a fixture and couldn’t be moved. He argued for ten minutes that a corner table that fit perfectly into the corner had to stay where it was because it was part of the apartment. What he was really saying is that he was part of the apartment.

Earlier that day in the storage unit, I’d found the tiny bulb boxes that he’d labeled with the names of every lamp they belonged to. There was the extra large water bottle in that unit that they’d bought just in case the water in the building was ever shut down again, like it had been during three days in a storm. My father doesn’t label things anymore. He can barely use his cellphone.

Later when we were nearly done, my dad said “You wouldn’t have to worry about any of this if we had just stayed here.” Well, yes. And rather gratuitously my mother reminded him, “Our daughters made us do this”. Why were they so clear on this point and yet couldn’t remember not to double pay their rent in the assisted living?

It’s strange how much I miss being the daughter that my parents always worried about. I forget what that was like now that I have to worry about them.