Along with thousands of other travelers, I flew home today from Oklahoma City.<\/p>\n
Unlike them, I wasn\u2019t visiting for the NBA finals.<\/p>\n
I flew to Oklahoma a week ago to help my mom with my 86-year-old father, who fell over Memorial Day weekend and fractured a vertebra. After a several-day stay in the hospital, he was sent to a rehabilitation center so that he could participate in intensive therapies\u2014physical, occupational, and speech. Since he injured himself and entered the hospital, he has lost most of his ability to walk (because of his back brace, plus atrophying muscles), talk (weak vocal cords), and put on his glasses (weak motor control). Fortunately he is lucid, and his physical condition has been improving.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, this sudden turn of events has been very hard on my mother, who\u2019s only a few years younger than he is. There\u2019s a lot to do, much of it stressful. For the past week, we\u2019ve been visiting my father, tracking down nurses and doctors and therapists, meeting with care managers and lawyers and neighbors, visiting other facilities, and talking to insurance companies.<\/p>\n
It all gives a new meaning to the name of this column, \u201cglobal mama,\u201d when you think about it a bit more expansively and in terms of long-distance caregiving<\/em>. Which is probably one of the reasons I\u2019ve always been drawn to issues such as transnational mothering in the first place.<\/p>\n I live in New York. My elderly parents and my younger sister, a 40-year-old woman with Down syndrome, live in Oklahoma. And she\u2019s not getting any younger, either.<\/p>\n My mom is the primary caregiver for my father right now. But his recent fall and my trip have started me thinking about a lot of things. About the fact that my aging mother is caring for an increasingly infirm husband and an adult daughter with mental disabilities. About the fact that my mother and my sister are aging. About the increasingly obvious fact that in addition to being a mother of young kids, one with severe food allergies, I am also a long-distance caregiver.<\/p>\n I have never understood how this is going to work. To be honest, I have preferred straight-up denial, because my life feels way too complicated already. But I am starting to do what I do best when faced with complex, uncertain, and slightly terrifying challenges: write. I have started to read about eldercare issues and to process what I am reading, one sentence at a time. I have a lot to learn.<\/p>\n Caring for aging parents is a hot topic right now. Just take a look at the June 11 Time<\/em> magazine issue, with its cover article \u201cHow to Die<\/a>\u201d by Joe Klein. Or last month\u2019s New York<\/em> magazine, with the devastating cover article by Michael Wolff: \u201cMom, I Love You. I Also Wish You Were Dead. And I Expect You Do, Too<\/a>.\u201d (That one nearly sent me over the edge. Wolff is one of the most brutally honest journalists I\u2019ve ever read.) Sandra Tsing Loh recounts her own familial story in an Atlantic magazine review<\/a><\/em> of three recent books about caring for aging parents, one of which I\u2019m reading: Jane Gross\u2019s A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents\u2014and Ourselves<\/a><\/em>. So far, it\u2019s quite good; as a journalist, she\u2019s a bit more measured in a genre that tends toward trafficking in \u201cElderschadenfreude<\/em>\u201d (pure Sandra Tsing Loh, and she hits the nail on the head). But even Gross\u2019s story provides little to no comfort.<\/p>\n Gross writes with an attuned sensitivity to gender. For example, she observes that most adult children caring for elderly parents are daughters. While many are sons, the numbers aren\u2019t equal. Just like there\u2019s a \u201cmommy track,\u201d there\u2019s a \u201cdaughter track.<\/p>\n But these two worlds share less than we might think, she argues. For example, she writes that while many companies have addressed (some of) the needs of working parents with programs like parental leave policies, few if any workplaces have addressed the needs of caregiving adult children with comparable policies and programs.<\/p>\n This depresses me. As if<\/em> we\u2019ve made enough progress on support for working families. (Have I mentioned that my own maternity leave was unpaid<\/em>?) To add insult to injury, according to Gross, we\u2019re even further behind with policies supporting nonprofessional caregivers.<\/p>\n The childcare paradigm doesn\u2019t work well for the end of life. Gross points out that pregnancy and birth can generally be planned for, well in advance. (Adoption, of course, is another story.) But most end-of-life crises can\u2019t.<\/p>\n Thankfully my dad fell during summer vacation. But what about when something happens during the semester? Or during a family trip? I\u2019ve realized that I have to accept a fair amount of constant uncertainty.<\/p>\n Gross writes to help adult children navigate these uncertainties (she is also the founder of The New Old Age Blog<\/a> at The New York Times<\/em>). So far, I\u2019m finding A Bittersweet Season<\/em> helpful. I even thought about giving it to my mother, but I hesitated. The book isn\u2019t really written for her. So I have started to look for resources for caregiving wives\u2014another \u201ctrack,\u201d I realize, similar and yet different from the \u201cmother\u201d and \u201cdaughter\u201d tracks.<\/p>\n All three \u201ctracks\u201d occur when women (still) perform caregiving work and shoulder the invisible emotional toll of caregiving\u2014despite the way that traditional gender roles have opened up. As Peggy Orenstein writes in Flux<\/a><\/em>, our world remains \u201chalf-changed\u201d: institutions and social policies have not kept pace with how many families now live their lives. And, I would add, roles such as daughterhood and wifehood\u2014like motherhood\u2014carry with them gendered stereotypes and expectations. The dutiful daughter. The martyred wife. These can be damaging, particularly when others expect women to do it all, and to bear their burden silently.<\/p>\n