Is Caring For Elderly Parents a Burden or Responsibility?
When you are old and gray where would you like to spend your last one year as your body slowly withers away? Would you like to see the smiling face of your grandchildren every morning as they greet you before leaving for school?
Or would you like to be woken up by the loud plastic curtain being ripped open to let in light by an overgrown, foreign immigrant who barely speaks English? Can you imagine sacrificing most of your life providing love, food, shelter, and education for your children only to left alone to die with a bunch of strangers who don’t even know your first name?
Imagine being so lonely all day long in a single room no larger than a jail cell but a little more light. You are away from your family, no one around to smile, no one around to laugh, no one around to hug.
You are afraid. You are awaiting heaven in hell.
You will hear many elderly people make the claim “Oh, I don’t want to be a burden on my children.” Now where does this chain of thought originate from? Perhaps, their parents were a burden on them?
In a family where compassion, love and respect is always #1 whether or not to bring mom into the home when she cannot care for herself is not even a question.
If mom and dad taught the golden rule to the children when they were small and then reinforced it by setting examples through their actions while growing up, there is no reason why this golden rule would not be prevalent now.
The problem lies in the example and expectations set to those children while they were growing up. Did grandma live at home when she was unable to take care of herself?
Also, circumstances are different in every family, as parents might still be working and unable to be at home or unable to provide medical assistance. A solution is to have a care person at your home during hours which you are at work or even a permanent live in nurse.
The golden rule is rather simple. Do unto others as you expect others to do unto you. Many people, while not thinking father than a year in advance, choose their own destiny when they set the expectation to the one who will face that same decision in the future.
When the time comes that you must make this decision to care for your elderly parents, there are two ways you can look at it. You can look from the past or you can look from the future.
Looking from the future of course has no guarantees and to some degree a certain element of risk. If making your decision from the heart it should be simple, but not necessarily easy.
If your parents took care of your grandma you may feel like it’s your responsibility to do the same for your mother. You may even see it as a burden on your daily routine.
On the flip side, if you think about the example you would like to set for your children, the decision becomes much easier. Decide with your heart.
Assuming you have made the right decision and your mother is now comfortably living in your home, realize her emotional struggle. As much as you may not want a burden, she does not want to be a burden.
Remember to always think from a position of love. Now is the time to go to the basics. Do you remember when you were young how important it was to get your colored picture taped up on the refrigerator?
One of the most basic human needs is the desire to feel important. There is no better way to make them feel important and influential than the presence of grandchildren.
This may not always be possible, and if not then remember to assign mom certain tasks which she is responsible for to keep her mind working and allowing her to feel like she is contributing to the household.
Keeping her emotionally stable is more important than sustaining her physical body since her mental state will directly impact her physical health.
Some suggest you should give back what you got from your mother: time, patience, love and a great deal of compassion. However, giving back stems from a position of owing instead of a position of kindness and an attitude of “I choose.”
Nobody likes to owe anybody. Often f they knew they would owe somebody they would have not chosen to receive. A true gift has no expectation of return.
Therefore if you choose to bring mom in, it should be based on your decision to give out of love, not out of liability.
If your mother ever knew that you were providing out of liability instead out of love, you would cause her guilt which would negate the entire experience.
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Your Personal Growth Mentor,
James Blackburn
Grandma made it to 88 and we'll miss her.
My Other Grandma and Cousin Chrtistopher
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My wife’s mother is in great health and is a very intergral and active part of my wifes life, and as a result mine and our son’s. She is also quite elderly.
Although my B and her mother have on the surface a close relationship, my wife has made it clear that as soon as her mother becomes a burden, through illness or age, she will send her back to China, either to her sister or to a nursing home.
This is a very pragmatic approach, and oddly, her mother is in complete agreement with this.
Now my wife claims to have been raised in a very close family, and this is borne out of the ongoing contact she maintains with the rest of her family, but something about the pragmatism of these relationships doesn’t sit well with me.
They tend to represent relationships of convenience, which in my ‘Western’ world is the anti-thesis of the foundation for family. In any case, it has worked well for their whole family so far, and given that there has never been any family inheritence to fight over, the relationships have remained symbiotic and mutually beneficial.
Of course, this is the easy part. If or when her mother ages to a point where she herself needs ongoing help, the pressures on the whole family will be compounded. Although I have some work colleagues who have easily transitioned their parent’s into a nursing home facility, the emphasis on family within the Chinese culture, I expect, would make this a more difficult proposition.
Only time will tell, and although my mother-in-law is in great shape for her age, both mentaly and physically, she does have a worriesome tremor and increasing rigidity in her body, which is looking more and more like Parkinson’s disease.
For those who know about this disease, it is progressive and insidious, and takes a terrible toll on the whole family in terms of the level of care that is required. For my mother-in-law’s sake, I hope that this care, no matter how difficult, is provided by us, and not a nursing home. It just wouldn’t be right.