An online journal for women engaging the third third of their lives.
The Third Third Topic: Aging Parents
Our already-complex relationships with our parents can be tested at this time in our lives - and theirs — by mental and physical health issues, financial constraints, your sense of responsibility, their sense of entitlement or fierce independence, and the absence of a roadmap for this part of the journey. Let's talk about what we know, what we're learning, and what we need.
Perspectives on Aging Parents
An Assist for Assisted Living
An assisted living facility is nothing more than “a goddam rest home,” according to my father, who, clearly under duress, moved into a really very lovely place in May.
I’ve been trying to look at it through his eyes since that little outburst and I’ll give hi...
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AGING PARENTS | 17 Views | 0 Comments
You Can't Please Daddy
What is it about selling my father’s house that prompted a full-scale emotional meltdown on my part?
It stuns me, it really does, to think that I have arrived in the third third of my life and I can still turn on a full-court press to “please Daddy.” And then (wor...
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AGING PARENTS | 59 Views | 0 Comments
Truth or Consequences
When I was a child, the word “parent” was a noun, and not a verb.
I was trained and disciplined, fed, clothed, educated, loved, criticized, corrected, reprimanded, and, upon occasion, punished. I was not parented. My parents knew of Dr. Spock, but not of Brazelton, Piaget, ...
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AGING PARENTS | 116 Views | 2 Comments
Letting go of my Father
When things are “not quite right” (as Miss Clavell says as she turns out the light in Ludwig Bemelmans’, delightful children’s tale, Madeline), I tend, like many of my friends, to start reading anything I can about the subject at hand.
I want to know and understand, as if ...
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AGING PARENTS | 85 Views | 0 Comments
The Caretaker Daughter
It is one thing to have a good discussion with your 88 or 89 year-old mother about end-of-life issues. It’s quite another, my 50-something (and favorite) cousin reminded me yesterday, to live through them.
Quite another. In fact, she said she wasn’t sure...
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AGING PARENTS | 233 Views | 0 Comments
Where is Dad Supposed to Live?
Unlikely as it seems with both the economy and the housing industry in such turmoil, I have a surefire way to make a fortune: design and build cost-effective, safe, comfortable, down-sized homes for our senior senior citizens, people like my father. They exist, of course, in some places, but usu...
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AGING PARENTS | 320 Views | 0 Comments
When Independence Trumps Reason
My father always remembers our birthdays. He knows my sisters and I are grown woman with grown children of our own. But he treats us as if we were all still 12 and a bit of a bother, rejecting both our professional accomplishments and the people we have become at 54, 57, and 60 with a vehemence ...
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AGING PARENTS | 439 Views | 0 Comments
That Final Stop on the Journey
One of the experiences we share in The Third Third is the death of loved ones, so I wanted to share with you that my mother, Helen Isabel Ferris Hynes, died at the age of 94 at St. Mary's Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota on Sunday.
She lived independently all of her life, volunteered...
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AGING PARENTS | 333 Views | 0 Comments
Caretakers: Your New Best Friends
“A-yunn.” Crystal believed my name had two syllables.
Like she believed that Jesus Christ had died for her sins, that tanning salons were safer than beaches, and that “them little weenies in a can” constituted a legitimate source of protein for her kids.
&ldqu...
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AGING PARENTS | 474 Views | 0 Comments
Taking Away the Car Keys
We third-third-ers fortunate enough to still have parents spend a fair amount of time justifying what we do or do not do for them. We seek to validate our decisions, constantly in my case – with ourselves, our siblings, our spouses, our parents themselves, and our friends. Of these, I find...
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AGING PARENTS | 434 Views | 0 Comments
What the Things We Keep Say.
I packed up my father’s home last week. Not my childhood home, but the place he’s lived since he retired to North Carolina 20 years ago.
Though he is still very much alive, we had an estate sale, my brother and I. And it’s the ball markers that stick in my mind. Not the a...
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AGING PARENTS | 587 Views | 0 Comments
Should I Move my Dad Next Door?
When our long-time neighbor, aged 85, moved into assisted living after a series of falls, he and his family played right into a fantasy I’ve secretly harbored for several years: I could move my dad into the house next door! There, I reasoned, my sisters and I could take better care of him ...
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AGING PARENTS | 1169 Views | 0 Comments
After the Fall
My dad says it was my fault. If I hadn’t called him that evening, (I call almost every night), he wouldn’t have tangled his feet in the throw rug in front of his chair and fallen, busting open his head and damaging his eye. Go figure.
The problem is, I agree. It is my fault.
...
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AGING PARENTS | 667 Views | 0 Comments
Blog entries on Aging Parents
The Caregiving Passage
Gail Sheehy’s latest book chronicling life’s ages and stages just as we “of a certain age” reach them, is called Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos into Confidence (May, 2010). In a related story in the July 5 Newsweek,she calls a “second round of ca...
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Category: AGING PARENTS | 61 Views | 0 Comments | July 08, 2010 10:17:55 am
Welcome to the Departure Lounge
Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother is author Meg Federico's memoir of the misery of long-distance care-taking for an aging, failing, and ultimately, dying mother -- and stepfather. It is a How-Not-To-Do-It. It is, also -- and I was never sure Federico recognized ...
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Category: AGING PARENTS | 380 Views | 0 Comments | May 26, 2009 12:10:47 am
Heavy Blanket of Misery
The New York Times Online launched a new blog for us this month. According to writer Jane Gross, "Thanks to the marvels of medical science, our parents are living longer than ever before. Adults over age 80 are the fastest growing segment of the population, and most will spend years depende...
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Category: AGING PARENTS | 374 Views | 0 Comments | July 02, 2008 2:51:42 pm
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