I have heard that this day would come. The role-reversal. The day when we, as adult children, would care for our aging parents. But I could not imagine my parents ever needing help from me. Not my strong, funny, surgeon father, unwavering in his convictions, his intelligence, his “dad-ness.” And certainly not my beautiful, smart, energetic mother who ran a family of nine with a firm and loving hand, who had all the answers and who invented the phrase, “my way or the highway.” My parents would just keep going until they dropped. If they dropped. It seemed to me that they could live forever. I hoped so.
But here I am, on a plane, on my way to DC. My father is housebound with Parkinson’s syndrome and dementia. He needs to be fed, dressed, and much to his horror if he were fully conscious of it, occasionally changed and cleaned.
My mother, recovering from leg surgery, cannot be on her feet for long periods of time. She can’t cook or clean or care for Dad as she has, amazingly, done for years. So my sisters and I are rotating in to help out for a week at a time, along with aids (who have become like family members) who come in to do the moving and lifting and the really hard stuff.
My job will be to shop, cook, clean, feed Dad, help my mother bathe and take her to doctor appointments and church. When was the last time I helped someone bathe? Fed someone? Did laundry for anyone other than myself? Drove anyone to a doctor appointment? That’s right – when my children were…children. So, yes, the time has come. I just didn’t know it would feel like this.
Dad’s illness has rendered him childlike and 100 percent dependent on the care he receives. Mom, on the other hand, is thoroughly lucid and feeling better, which is a blessing, but has me trembling just a tad. It’s too early for a drink so I’m nursing my water and practicing yogic breathing as I write. After a hellish week at work, the busiest month of my year, and the emotional retirement of a beloved boss of 22 years (only yesterday), I am steeling myself for the inevitable questions… about my hair.
But I’m going. Because that is what I’m supposed to do. Because I am a good daughter. And because I have a good therapist to come home to.
This transition we are going through as mid-lifers – the one where we are turning the reins over to our children as we begin to step up our involvement with our parents – is an interesting one. We are using the tools we acquired while raising our children -- the very ones that our parents used raising us -- to help our parents now. It’s really kind of perfect, isn’t it?
I continue, as with most of my life, to learn on the job. I am learning to trust my daughters to find their own way, to make education and career decisions, navigate relationships and take care of themselves when they are sick. As Sue Monk Kidd so beautifully reflects in her book Traveling With Pomegranates, “Every woman needs to become self-mothering… To learn to take care of herself, to love herself… to find a mother in herself. [My daughter] will replace me. That’s the point now.”
Yes – that is the point. BUT IT’S HARD!! After 24 years in Mom-School I have to unlearn all that. I am pedaling backwards and stepping out when every cell in my body still tells me to step in. The fact that my mother was never fully de-programmed makes caring for her a bit challenging. But it’s also what keeps her in the game – and that is something precious. Something I respect and for which I am grateful.
Having parents who need me now is helpful in a way. My daughters are competent adults. Their self-sufficiency makes it easy for me to leave them to take care of my parents. It keeps me from meddling too much in their lives while allowing me to model good daughtering for them (see – there it is – the mother-thing again. So sue me). A side benefit is that it allows me to use some of that mother energy that I am repressing. It gives me an outlet for what I do so well – and what I love to do.
It is a beautiful thing to care for one’s parents. I love getting close to my Dad the way he needs me to now. It allows me to say I love you in a way that words could never express. And, I hope, I’ll have the chance to do that for my mother. To show her how well she taught me. To put into practice the compassion both parents instilled in my siblings and me.
This daughter will try to be a mother to her parents -- if they will let me. This mother will continue to be a mother to her daughters -- when they let me. And this woman is learning to be a mother to herself. Permission granted.
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