How much do your parents get involved if you were living abroad?

[Hellokittymania]

I just need some perspective here. I have a disability, and I live abroad, and it’s making things turn into a nightmare right now. I have lived abroad for many years, and now I am growing a lot and needing to change the meeting to be more independent and do things for myself, but especially this year, it’s been quite difficult. But this is why I need to be able to do as much as I can. In a situation like we’ve just gone through, with the lockdown and everything, I haven’t been able to do as much as I’m capable of. I feel like my mother intervenes so often, and with everything. Sometimes, I don’t know if it’s because of my disability, or because I’m living so far away, and she can’t just come over. So I’m wondering, how much do your parents get involved? If you are sick for example in on your own abroad, what do your parents do? I need to come up with some ideas that could maybe help her to learn to support me better.

I've lived in a different country to my parents since I was 20. I didn't tell them a lot of stuff because I knew they would worry. Nothing terrible ever happened, but there were a few things. But I felt no point as they couldn't do anything. They really had no choice but hope that I was doing fine unless they heard otherwise.
I'm sure it's a mixture of love and guilt that keeps your mother interfering. It is hard to cut those apron strings, so you must be patient but firm with her about your need for independence. If she says she will sort something for you, politely decline.
Going forward, I'd make a regular time to check in with her once or twice a week via Facetime or Skype. Use it not just to catch up with yours and her news, but to subtly remind her that you are doing well and enjoying life. Don't make her feel redundant, just let her know that while you will always need her support and love, you don't need it so intensely. When she sees you are thriving she may well back off.
Also be sure to ask about her life and encourage her to make other things, not just you, a priority.

Thank you for replying. Yes, that’s what I’m trying to do. I know with the coronavirus, she has been spending a lot of time at home, since she has underlying health conditions and lives in a place where the coronavirus is a big problem. It seems that has magnified her need to micromanage me. I’m having a bit of a health condition at the moment, she spoke to the doctor without asking me. I had to ask the doctor not to speak with her, since additional worrying from other people and interfering it’s not going to make things easier for me. It’s just going to upset me and make things more difficult. I have suggested that she find some other activities she could do over zoom, or even read some audiobooks to people or something else like that.

I have changed a lot over the past year, and she doesn’t know how to support me.

Do you feel that you need your mother to support you, or does it feel as though supporting you has become about her needs now, not about what you need?

It makes a difference as it sounds as though she's actually just interfering because she's bored and lonely and needs to be needed. That's not on. Parents of adult children do sometimes find it hard to let go, but it can become selfish and damaging past a certain point.

I was abroad alone for a year when I was 18 (way back in the early 1990s) and I phoned home once per month and wrote a letter once per week. I contracted dengue fever and deliberately chose not to tell my parents because I didn't want to be "rescued". Obviously if I'd have died that would have been the wrong decision, but it was really important to me to get out of their sphere of influence and be independent. My mother does meddle in my sibling's lives and make things about her, and I still deal with it by censoring what I tell her and only telling her about tricky situations or illnesses after they are over. I'm a lot older now but that's been the case for decades now.

If you do need your mother's help due to your disabilities it's a lot trickier to manage. If you don't then I'd stop giving her so much information. If she doesn't need to be in contact with your doctors she has no reason to have their names. Certainly your doctors shouldn't be speaking to her without your explicit consent, unless she has some form of continuing legal guardianship of you as an adult?