Paranoid family members

[bohemianvegan]

I have been in Korea for 16 months now as an English teacher. My mother is always paranoid. First, she freaked out when I told her I would be taking a bus BY MYSELF in the evening to Wal*Mart in Bucheon

Comments

[savage_angel]

Well, not nearly to that extent... but if I don't email my mother nearly every day to tell her I'm okay she starts to panic and freak out. She'll call my phone, my cell phone... and then failing that she'll start calling my fiance's father. It's really really annoying. And that was before everything happened in my family... like my brother being in Afghanistan, now she's even more panicked. Luckily she doesn't call the police or embassy :P

[claydust]

i rarely e-mailed while i was traveling, but i did keep an updated blog which i think staved off any of that sort of panic.

now that i'm living abroad my mum emails all of the time, and thinks that i don't email her enough. i think she's bored.

a friend dealt with the same sort of problem that you're having. eventually she just told her mum that it wasn't practical to call every day, but that she'd call once a week- and that seemed to work.

[wicked_g]

It wasn't exactly for me, but when I was still in Hong Kong, and the whole Danish cartoon thing came about, my dad was travelling (who is Danish), and I got a worried email from my friend in Canada. It was nice to be able to talk about it, especially since he was supposed to be going to Indonesia for business, but turns out that trip was cancelled.

Phew.

Anyway, apart from that, nope, nothing much else. SARs didn't get as much publicity as I thought it would until it hit the West, and neither did the Bird Flu-during the multiple times it has happened in Hong Kong, and we've all sruvived through it. Ok, fine, most of us, even though I can't be sure, but you get my point.

Oh! Wait-last year, when it was time to vote for the new PM here in Canada, my mum was worried when a Conservative was put into power. Kinda amusing, but really, I keep in constant email contact with my family almost all the time, regardless. Mainly because I don't have much of a friend base here (Canada).

[frontdispatches]

Wow. Even when I first lived abroad at legnth at 18, an e-mail once every couple of weeks more than sufficed. I'm actually kind of blown away by the other comments on this thread; different parenting philosophies, I guess?

[inulro]

It's weird. On the one hand, when I was between the ages of 19 and 21, on a good day my mother knew which country I was in (this was before email). On the other hand, she had a massive fit when I moved to Toronto when I finished my degree, because she thought I'd die horribly in the Big City (which is significantly safer than where she lives, but there's a huge amount of denial going on there). She is, however, the most pessimistic person in the world and no matter what I plan all she can think about is the worst case scenario.

[je11ifysh]

I'm married and in my thirties and my mom and dad still freak out about every little thing. Okay, sometimes they aren't so little. The weird thing is they never call directly. They call my brother who then calls/emails me to tell me to call them.
Parents, ya gotta love 'em.