joyfulgirl said:
I'm trying to wrap my brain around the fact that the same woman who just sang Handel's Messiah with one of Virginia's top symphonies needs to move into assisted living.
What *are* some of the trouble signs children with aging, single parents ought to be alert to? Could anyone provide a list?
This kind of thing really worries me when I think about my own mother's situation. At 75, she lives alone a couple hours north of Miami (a very long day's drive from the nearest child) and she just loves her solitude, paints and sculpts, teaches a Forever Learning class in Greek occasionally, etc. Yet, as you point out, persistent high competence in some areas doesn't mean that others aren't slipping dangerously. As the child best financially placed to look after her, I've told her more than once how much we'd love to have her in our house, wheedled her with appeals to how much fun the kids would find having her around, etc. But she won't hear of it--she loves her space and her ocean and her sunshine and all that. Most years we only see her twice a year, and only for a short time, and same for the rest of my sibs, so I can't say with confidence that we really would *know* if her day-to-day self-care competence was slipping, which scares me.
I guess for me it's hard to come to terms with the fact that now I know for sure we are unlikely to have any kind of healing between us and I'll have to put all my issues aside and process them without her.
Actually this makes me wince at how full of garbage I am, because one of my favorite platitudes to drop on friends expressing their fears of initiating a long-needed healing dialogue with their parent (or child) has always been: Do It Now, because nothing that could come out of anyone's mouth during that process could possibly be as painful as suddenly and irrevocably losing the chance to do it at all. Yet through almost two decades of wisely saying this, I put off working through things with my own mother--we've always gotten on well enough, but there were so many awkward silences and don't-go-there areas stemming from the years after my father died and I tried to fill his shoes by "helping" her raise my two younger sibs, often overzealously and through comments that didn't show much respect for all the emotional exhaustion and isolation she was going through.
Pathetically, what finally made it happen was when I had serious medical problems myself last year and finally had no choice but to call her and tell her what was happening, which was damn near the hardest thing I ever had to do--I had so much invested in being the good, reliable kid who always helped her out but never gave her cause to worry about me. But anyway, this turned out to be a blessing, because I was thus able to work through a lot of that baggage not only with her, but also with my older brothers, who I'd long resented on some levels for what I considered their failure to pitch in after my dad died.
I guess all I can say is good luck working through it all, don't hesitate to draw upon your siblings in the process (people who think "Oh,
they're no help" *usually* turn out to be wrong), and know that the worth of helping her out when she most needs you--even if she can't fully appreciate it--ultimately outranks that of having everything all neatly worked out (which never
fully happens anyway) in the big picture of a lifetime of caring for each other. Parents and children inevitably hurt each other at some points, that's just the way it is, and no one can hope to rectify all of it.
Originally posted by nbcrusader
We've been forced to get a conservatorship in order to care for my dad.
nb, how are things going with him now?
