When You Move In With Your Aging Parent, You Learn All Kinds of Things!
Perhaps nothing can teach an adult child as much about life and their aging parent than moving in with, and taking care of that parent, which is what I did for six years. It’s also the basis of my humorous self-help book, Why is Grandma Naked? Caring for Your Aging Parent, coming out March 16, 2021 on Amazon as an ebook and paperback. As the daughter who saw Mom the most and who lived nearby, I thought I knew as much as any adult child could about a parent before I moved in. After all, I’d heard all her childhood stories more than once and that was even before she declined to the point where she’d forgotten which daughter she’d told which story to or forgot she’d told any of us that story. But no. Not only did returning to my childhood home and attending to the needs of Mom, a Depression era child who’d had an emotionally deprived childhood, teach me and transform me; it (and I) gave her a sense of safety and security like she’d never had before, which was extraordinarily gratifying to me. Mom began to consider me a safe repository of her long-buried childhood and young-adult experiences. And truth to tell, I felt privileged, and I benefited in more ways than one from my new-found enhanced understanding of who Mom was and how’d she became that way. I now had the missing details. And insofar as I’d always respected and loved my mother, I loved and respected her all the more in light of these details.
Just one example: she recalled as a young child seeing her younger brother foraging for food in a garbage can. They were motherless children, raised for the most part in their early years by an assortment of negligent babysitters. But I couldn’t help but wonder if it was Mom and not her brother who had done the foraging.
Another of Mom’s stories gave me a better understanding of why she’d been as solitary as she was. After getting married and having a baby, she made a very dear friend. They lived in the same apartment building. They had babies the same age. They shopped together, pushed their baby carriages together, did everything together. And then one day, her friend had a pain in her foot and inside of two weeks, her friend was dead. It was leukemia, which then was an almost-certain death sentence. It must have been a terrible shock to Mom. She’d had so many losses. She’d grown up without ever knowing her mother or the circumstances of her absence. Her uncle, whose household she’d lived in for ten years as a teenager and young adult had made it clear he didn’t want Mom there. (This too, was another fact Mom had never told me before. Nor had she told me that she felt so uncomfortable and unwanted there that she always showered at the local Y.) Perhaps Mom was afraid of getting close to people who might in an instant disappear from her life. To Mom, the world was neither a safe nor welcoming place.
Now the funny part: Mom had a set of false delusions (and I detail several of the funniest ones in my book.) They were harmless delusions but they were nonetheless, delusions. And with that, came her reports, which I’ll call her “sightings,” people she’d seen recently who she’d had some sort of relationship with many years ago, but who were not her friends. One day Mom came home from the supermarket exercised that S., who Mom had played mah jongg with many years before, had snubbed her across the fresh produce aisle. (Okay. So maybe S. had snubbed her. That is possible or it is far more likely that S. didn’t see her. Both Mom and S. were ninety at the time!) And then there was Mrs. G., who Mom had been in a religious school carpool with forty years before, and who Mom now claimed she saw sitting in an adjacent car in a parking lot, and heard the woman say in a loud enough voice for Mom to hear, “She looks very old” [meaning Mom.] I tried to explain to Mom that it couldn’t have been Mrs. G, who had probably gone to another, “better” place (either she’d died or went to where most elderly New Yorkers move to, Florida). But Mom wouldn’t hear it. It was Mrs. G., she continued to insist, even after I googled Mrs. G’s name and showed Mom she’d moved to Florida.
It was at that point I realized that Mom’s world consisted of these mini-dramas and that she needed them to spice up her life! And besides, who was I to convince her otherwise? My willingness to accept Mom’s false reality led me to become a more accepting person in general, I believe. Not that I wasn’t an accepting person already! But now, I’m even more open to accepting people as the imperfect, quirky, and strange people they are, especially if they are family members!