Sheila Weller

For the last three weeks, my texting conversation with my 37-year-old son, Jonathan, a married father of two young children, has been like tossing a beach ball back and forth.

HIM: How are you and Dad, Mom? Take care!

ME: We are fine! You guys take care!

HIM: We are worried about you! You’re in the most vulnerable demographic.

ME: Thanks. We are OK. Don’t be concerned about us! We are concerned about you two and the precious boys!

HIM: Don’t worry about us — we’re great! We are the ones worrying about you! [REPEATS FOR EMPHASIS:] You’re in the vulnerable demographic! [TRANSLATION: You guys are old. ]

Then, or other times, he will give orders: “Do not go to any stores — all the stores are germ-laden.” “Do not let the cleaning woman come into the apartment — clean it yourself!” ”Wear a mask and gloves every single time you go outside.” And, now: “You had the supermarket deliver without going inside? Thank you!" And: “Yes, you may have to stay indoors for two more months, but it’s better than death.”

We have followed his orders, of course. And even on things I have already known, I yield to him. If he says to do it, it’s twice as obvious.

I used to be the helpful parent

Simultaneously, and defensively, long-dormant memories pop up: My husband and I, rushing to the ER after getting a call that he, at 11, was hurt in a Little League practice — and rushing him home safely. Me, nursing him through mononucleosis when he was 12. And, when he was 14: Me being the safety obsessed balabusta who got his high school to stop letting its double-decker school buses drive fast and a mere foot away from the low-guard-railed edge of the thin bridge over the Hudson River.

These memories are reminding my withering self-esteem: I was the helpful parent once! How did this natural order get turned around?

I do the same with my stepdaughter Suzanne, who lives in Berkeley with her husband and their two teenagers and who has been frequently texting and calling and emailing: “How are you? Take care of yourselves! Don’t go into any stores!”

“I’m worried about you and the kids!” I respond, and the familiar back and forth begins.

Decades ago, I drove from Manhattan to visit Sarah Lawrence freshman Suzanne on Parents Day. I was the representative of the in-charge older generation. Now she’s saying to me: “You and Dad don’t have good, real face masks? I am going to go online and order you and Dad two.”

It’s a cliché but true that we Boomers thought we would never be “old.” Many of the females among us will, secretly, always be those sassy, waist-length-haired adventuresses who journeyed to Ibiza and Morocco, listening to "The Marrakesh Express" on our vinyl-album-ready turntables and having full-moon romances with guys who looked like Crosby, Stills or Nash.

When our insurance policies started including cheery notifications that we were eligible for gym discounts from something retro-jauntily named the Silver Sneakers program, we have rolled our eyes and tensed in insult. But: the buck’s stopped here.

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Molly Jong-Fast recently wrote a Vogue essay headlined, "Why Are So Many Baby Boomers In Denial Over the Coronavirus?" She said her “fabulous feminist mother,” “Fear of Flying” author Erica Jong, kept insisting she wasn’t in the “target age group” when Molly repeatedly and parentally told her to self-isolate. (Jong, who is 78, finally relented.)

So some of this is vanity and self-delusion. But some is long-suppressed vulnerability. “Baby Boomers have clearly been humbled by the virus. Many are truly facing their mortality for the first time. People are talking about feeling `paranoid,’ `scared,’ `super nervous,’ and `terrified,’” New York-based clinical psychologist Dean Parker told me. (He is 64 and acceded to his newly “parental” adult sons’ orders to stop having in-person sessions, but not until a week after they told him to.)

Still, my worries are not for myself but for our kids.

We expected our kids to be lucky

The biggest takeaway I have from the table-turning between us Boomer parents and our adult kids is sadness and guilt. Many of us were part of a spoiled generation — so pampered by our comfortable suburban childhoods that we brazenly renounced them during the Summer of Love. Our parents, the Greatest Generation, suffered for us: from the 1918 influenza to the Great Depression to World War II. We were outlandishly lucky, and we have expected our kids to be luckier still. It is the order of things, we naively inferred, that each generation has it easier than the previous one.

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Which is why, whenever my son and stepdaughter said they were worried about us, I always pleaded back: “I am worried about all you guys!” It feels unconscionable that these wonderful Gen X-ers and grandchildren have to have this mind-boggling life of school closings, sports closings, birthday party closings, everything closings; insufficient tests and hospital beds, stuck-indoors life, and a broken economy! I want to howl at the moon: “It isn’t fair!”

In the late 1970s the novelist Thomas McGuane told me, of his troubled sister, “I can’t help but feel I used up some of the luck that should have gone to her.”

That is how I feel. I wonder if I remembered that one sentence from a long-forgotten interview because I sensed I would one day need it.

I want for our kids the luck that my generation accidentally tumbled into, insufficiently grateful for its bounty. If I could undo the luck of my youth and give it to them, I’d do so in a heartbeat. And if that statement makes me sound more like a parent than a parented: well, OK — I’ll take it.

Sheila Weller is an author whose books include “Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge" and "Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — And the Journey of a Generation." Find her on Facebook.