A friend of mine has a six-year-old daughter who is a born caregiver. She’s that rare child, who at an early age, is able to sense pain or sadness in others. She notices when friends don’t feel good or when her sister is sad. She’s at my son’s side with ice packs and cool cloths before I even notice he’s fallen off his bike. When Dad rubs his temples, she offers him a head rub. When Mom gets sick, she’s makes a cup of tea. This little girl is wonderful and will undoubtedly grow up to be a caregiver to many.
She is the complete opposite of my kids, who stay up later on days I’m most exhausted and who run to my bedside when I’m sick but only to demand snacks and have a pillow fight over my lifeless body.
Being sick in bed is no time for sympathy in our house.
I’d like to think I was the caregiving type of 6-year-old when I was a child, but I’m pretty sure I was more like my kids. Most of us as kids are too wrapped up in our own Fisher Price worlds to think about our parents and whether they’re feeling okay. When we’re teenagers, we might begin to notice our parents’ struggles but only in terms of how they affect us. Eventually, as adults, we have that first moment where we glimpse our parents’ mortality. It’s when we officially cross the line from childhood to adulthood—when we realize these parents who we never really thought about in terms of being human show us they’re not the super people we always thought they were.
That moment sometimes hits us head on when something catastrophic like a stroke or a fall happens. Or it can be something smaller, as it was for me, when I noticed how worn out my parents seemed after a weekend of babysitting our two boys (something I’d never noticed when we had only one kid).
Not everybody comes to this realization easily or peacefully—we see our parents’ mortality but we deny it. “She should still be able to care for my kids every day—she’s their grandmother after all.” “He shouldn’t be sleeping in the middle of the morning.” “She can’t be too tired for our annual family picnic!”
When it comes to peacefully accepting age, there’s a quote I like: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he will never be disappointed.” We live in a culture that’s pretty high on expectations—we see low expectations as failure. But lowering our expectations for our aging loved ones doesn’t mean we give up on them. It just means we dial back.
When we visit with our three children—their beloved but raucous grandchildren—we shorten the visit if they seem tired (and we put their house back together when we leave). If we have a family party planned, we give them the opportunity to come for just an hour—or not at all if they’re not up to it. We tell Mom she doesn’t have to cook her famous meatballs every time we visit, because we know she’s consumed with taking care of Dad. We keep our loved ones moving and socializing and engaging because we know cognitive and physical activities offset the symptoms of many aging-related illnesses, but we don’t overshoot. “Exercise” may mean just walking to the elevator of their assisted-living facility. Mental stimulation may be looking at a photo album or listening to music.
In our business, we see a lot of amazing family caregivers like my friend’s daughter—those who are ceaselessly patient and caring, who just sense when their loved one is tired or out of sorts. But there are a lot more of us who are like my children—figuratively pillow-fighting around our sick parents. Dialing back our expectations may be one of the hardest things for us to learn as we transition from child to adult to adult caregiver with our parents, but it’s also one of the most important.
Molly Rowe owns FirstLight Home Care with her husband, Steve Rowe, and lives in Swampscott with their two sons. FirstLight provides non-medical in-home care to adults in Swampscott, Marblehead, Nahant, Lynn, Salem, Peabody, Danvers, Beverly, and Lynnfield. For more information and help caring for your loved ones in the comfort of their own homes, please visit FirstLight’s website at www.salem.firstlighthomecare.com or contact Molly at 781-691-5755/[email protected]
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