Excuse me what happened to your wallet

At a particular stage in everyone's relationship with their parent(s), I'm sure there's a defining moment when you feel the balance of power shifting from parent to child. When the child becomes the one to call the shots instead of the parent. When the parent starts to regard the child as a grown up. When the parent reluctantly, but proudly, acknowledges that the child is ready to join the ranks of an adult.

Yeah. I think I had that moment with my mom when I got married. From there, it was pretty much downhill. The balance of power shifted right back to the parent after the wedding Ang Pows were opened. Or rather, there was another paradigm shift in our relationship, when my mother decided that she no longer needed to bring her wallet when we went out together. Why? Well because there's her wallet, walking right next to her. The wallet even pushes the trolley for her at the supermarket now. In fact, the only thing her wallet needs at this point is a driving licence.

It started with subtle hints, like she would allow me to pay for meals. Then suddenly, I was paying for all our meals together. And coffee too. Then one day, after loading up the trolley at the supermarket, she allowed me to push the trolley to the cashier and then promptly disappeared with The Son, ostensibly to amuse him or to take him to the toilet.

Now, I can't remember the last time I saw her wallet. All she brings with her when we head out is her car keys because I still can't drive. I'm lucky if there is even 20 cents in the coin pouch so that we can rent a trolley at the supermarket.

According to my girlfriends, I'm not alone. One of them recently went shopping for beauty products at Sephora with her mom and lo and behold when she got to the cashier's counter, there were a number of choice and rather pricey items in her basket that she never picked out. Another one asked a parent what he wanted for his birthday and was a little surprised when he picked out a rather expensive item. I guess at some point in the last decade or so, we crossed the line from adolescent to adult to paymaster. Or maybe the lines just got blurred so whilst we remained an adolescent adult, we also became a paymaster. I suspect that's a more accurate account of what really happened.

In other news, I got my health screening results, including the results of my eye test. Congratulations, my eyes can now fly a plane. Yay, me. The eye doctor's report threw me for a loop actually. It was written on the typical doctor's notepad, in the scrawly cursive that doctors always use, with squiggle at the bottom to pass as a signature. I realised that if I didn't look too hard at it, especially not with my newly discovered pilot's eyes, it looked exactly like one of my father's letters. My dad was a GP. He had terrible scrawly cursive handwriting. He used his doctor's writing pad for everything, even writing letters to his kids. The style, paragraphing and signature didn't change at all, even when what he wrote wasn't very nice. It even had the little rubber stamp at the bottom, underneath his signature. The paper had his name and clinic name printed at the top, and it was centralised. So now, when I see a doctor's report, a prescription or a doctor's referral note, I do a double take because it looks like yet another letter from my father. In keeping with his choice of stationery, what he wrote was also very succinct, pleasant or not. So it would be rare for us to get more than 3 sheets of paper, unless he was well and truly pissed off.

Coming back to the office and still holding my health screening results, I passed this poor young 20-something year old secretary, who looked up at me and said "Your dad called". Huh. I stared at her. "He said his name is Gerald", said she. I didn't have the heart to tell her that (a) he's dead; and (b) his name was not Gerald.