Jumping the Grand Canyon, or communicating with the parentals

Your entire relationship with your parents evolve when you move away from home, I have realized. Suddenly you are playing the lead role in a straight-to-TV movie, of Beloved-But-Potentially-Incompetent-Daughter, with your parents taking the counterpoint of Concerned-And-Loving-Parents-Of-Inept-Adult-Daughter-Who-Still-Cannot-Cook.

They worry about you constantly, asking you if you have enough money and refusing to believe you when you say you do, convinced that you will either starve to death or Supersize yourself by eating nothing but junk food.

And the most unnerving thing of all; in order to play your roles, you have to communicate.

I'm not saying I never speak to my parents. But when I was home, our schedules just didn’t mesh. When my parents were home, I was working. When I was home, my father would be playing golf or attending medical conferences and my mother would be out, traveling on business, or watching Korean dramas. And they didn't know what I did with my life, and I didn't know that did with theirs. I spoke most to my dad, who would drop me off at the bus stop in the mornings on our way to work. Our five-minute conversations were largely the extent of our daily interaction. There were whole weeks where I never spoke to my mother, especially if she was traveling for work. It suited us all fine, this sort of arrangement.

But now, we send each other emails.

It is unnerving to get email from your parents. Parents and email don't really gel. Until recently, the concept of email completely eluded my mother. She had me set up an account for her a long time ago, but promptly forgot her username and password. She also asked me if she could access her email from the office, or if she had to access her email from the same computer at which the email had been set up. (Which is not as bad as The Boy's mother, who was convinced that she could not receive spam so long as her computer was off.) . It's like your parents have suddenly morphed into teenagers in older bodies, and trying to make friends with you. This unprecedented level of communication makes me exceedingly nervous.

Then again, there are compensations. I got an email from my mother, only to find that she has described something as 'gross' with five exclamation marks, except she's spelled it 'grouse'. And my father has forwarded me something on elastic, which makes me worried, and which I have yet to download and view. My father related a story about an African frog which got shat on and bit someone on the bum, poisoning him. This was allegedly a story he heard in his latest medical conference. "Stay away from innocent-looking frogs," he warns me. "Good thing you're not in Africa." He also told me that he doesn't recognize people that he should know on the streets, and always wondered why perfect strangers were smiling at him. "Come to think of it," my father writes, "I was maybe passing a lot of people in the street who I should have known, now I know why some people on the street are smiling at me. I thought they were gay." The voice of tolerance, yep, that's my dad.