Role Reversal

Something I have yet to mention in this blog is care of elderly parents.  I am part of what is known as the 'sandwich generation';  meaning, there is an elderly parent in need of care and children still at home.

Before my mother had a caregiver move in I spent time with her either in person or on the phone almost every day.  She is nearly blind due to macular degeneration, and has vascular dementia due to a long history of heavy smoking and prior strokes. She is a survivor of lung cancer but has COPD and fibrous lung tissue partly due to radiation damage.  She has very poor short term memory and sometimes we have what I refer to as 'looping' conversations; meaning, we finish a conversation and then start the same one five or ten minutes later.

The really interesting thing is that interacting with Mom can be so similar to being with the kids.  Her cognitive deficits manifest in much the same ways as the kids' challenges because the vascular compromise and strokes affected her executive functioning.  It's difficult to know exactly where to place myself sometimes, and I go back and forth between being her child and taking the role of adult in charge.  The tricky thing is to know which hat to wear at any given time.

Do I always get it right?  Oh, heck no - in fact, I sometimes find myself arguing with her oppositional behavior, just as I used to with Boyo; she digs her heels in exactly the same way.  And it doesn't matter, in the long run, who has a particular photograph, or what kind of tree was planted along the road, or whatever other thing her memory has rearranged into a different story.  They're her stories.  All I have to do is react and respond in such a way that, as much as possible, her dignity is preserved and she feels valued.  In that respect, we're all the same: it doesn't matter whether you're the child, the parent, or the one in between.