Anyone who advances to middle age, who is lucky enough to still have one or both parents alive, is forced to confront the inevitability of their deaths. This becomes especially discombobulating when those parental relationships are strained either from emotional abuse tied to alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, or all those damn things. And then what happens when they become ill or unable to care for themselves anymore? The emotional sobriety is pressure-tested.

The Adult Child of Alcoholics program teaches the concept of “re-parenting,” which at its most basic is defined as “giving yourself what you didn’t receive as a child.” Most people I know who’ve found that program (myself included) regard it as more emotionally transformative than therapy. And emotional sobriety is tested when caretaking is involved. 

Today we’re running the responses from our readers who were asked to divulge their experiences: What has caring for your aging parents felt like for you so far? Has it impacted your recovery? What sort of horrible thoughts and feelings have surfaced? 

In addition to our usual anonymous TSB Orchestra, we have a special bylined participant, award-winning writer Elissa Altman, who has expertly written about this and many other tender subjects relevant to all TSB readers. —AJD

I Want My Own Life

By The Small Bow Family Orchestra (and Elissa Altman)

There isn’t resistance from the one who is ill. She, my original qualifier, tormentor, higher power — my mother — is no longer there. Her energy, her rage, her shame, her desperate love of family — all the things that made her, her (and, by way of prolonged exposure, to some degree, me) — have been replaced by a simpleton, day by day wasting away from Alzheimer’s and strokes. She knows only the present. It is only a matter of time, and over the past year I have found myself writing her eulogy in my head while I am on the bike or mowing the lawn — subconsciously running the grieving process like software in the background.

Since the day they told us she was diagnosed (and my immediate reactions of “I hope she has a massive stroke and dies” and “of course that bitch has found another way to torture us all”), my focus and concern have been on him — to ensure he knows that, even at 77, he has more to give, he has a relationship with his granddaughter to foster, and that I personally (and selfishly) will be lost if he is no longer in my life (fear). My focus is on making sure he is healthy, safe, and sane.

And yet the resistance is coming from him. His own mix of guilt, denial of reality, and commitment to his vows drives his resistance to my calls of “it’s time for a memory care facility” and “the best way to take care of her is to have a team take care of her.”

So I wait patiently, nod, listen without reaction, empathize, and plan in the background, knowing that an emergency will undoubtedly spur the action I advocate for.

My 77-year-old father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s about 3 years ago. At the time, he was ending a long run of colon cancer radiation, so his symptoms were chalked up to treatment. He didn’t even want to tell me, but my mother forced him to. I come from a family of uptight white people who never talk about anything. Watching my big strong dad cry to me in his kitchen was almost unbearable.

As of late, he has obviously gotten worse. It’s less the physical symptoms, but the mental ones. He is often totally out of it, not at all present, and my mom kind of shuffles him around like a toddler. They also recently moved to my city from the Midwest. I drove back to the West Coast with them in two separate cars with my older brother, who also has Down Syndrome. Am I glad they’re closer? My mom needs the support, but who the fuck am I to give it? I want my own life without them.

I’ve struggled with my father for a long time. His politics are awful; his weird topics and straight-off-of-Fox News rants were filling me with rage anytime he was around. I've never even made a formal amends to him. So I guess this is it.

My therapist suggested I start grieving now and has helped me have firm boundaries with them. But part of me also is grateful that he doesn’t really talk anymore. It’s made our interactions a lot easier. Then I feel guilty for feeling that way. Overall, I am sad for him. This must be very scary. But I’m also mad at him and my mom for not getting more support. They don’t have a community at all, and I’m scared that my sister and I will have to shoulder the burden. Though I recently heard my mom is starting therapy, which is HUGE NEWS.

I guess, I’m grateful to be sober during all this. I know I would’ve used it to spiral in the past.

For many, many years (since my dad was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2004, up until his death in 2019), I would get a certain type of phone call from my parents that immediately triggered what I now recognize as the first stage of a panic attack. Sometimes it was my mother, tattling about my father's bad behavior (increasingly worse as PD ate away at his cognition) as my father laughed and downplayed her story in the background. Sometimes it was one of them in a full state of panic (my father describing some phantom pain that required him to call 911; my mother reporting that my father had eloped from an inpatient stay), begging for my help. Either way, my first response was a full-body flush; a pounding heart; and an intense desire to throw up. I had no control over my own life; I was being parentified against my will. And yet . . . my very need to regain control made my actions in those moments feel of life-altering importance.

I wish I could tell you that me doing Something as a result of these phone calls made the situation better. What actually made it better was my father finally dying, devastating as that was and still is. My body remembers the feeling, though — “there is an emergency all the way across the country and ONLY YOU can fix it.” Here’s what my therapist tells me: DO you have to fix it? DO you have to place this burden on yourself? Can it be shared? Can you call other people in? Can you make plans for eventualities you KNOW will come to pass so that when you do have to take action, you’re prepared? But he always gently emphasizes that first question over all things: DO you have to fix it? Why do you feel like you must? Are you the only one who can? Why? Being forced to wrestle with this helps me make the situation more manageable.

My family dynamic is far from the picturesque families you see in the movies. My parents did not take care of me in the ways I needed when I was growing up. I felt more drawn to my friendships than to my family. My friends were my family. In that regard, my father was an alcoholic for all of his life up until two years ago. The war he waged on his body did not go unnoticed, and while he has been sober for the last two years, he now has stage 4 kidney disease. Caring for a parent that really wasn’t there for me all my life feels foreign to me. Feels like something I don’t need to do. Yet, having a dad that actually cares about me for the last two years has been incredibly rewarding for my inner child. So much that I can’t bear the thought of losing him too soon.

I have this pre-grief feeling that is underneath the surface. A yearning for a relationship I’ve wanted all my life and now that I have it, the time feels limited. My dad is able to care for himself essentially but needs me to vent to. Needs someone who has enough compassion to listen to his woes. Kidney disease is vicious but he is taking every precaution he needs to, to make sure he’s around as long as possible. I feel cheated sometimes in this life. That it took my parent this long to realize that he had other people who wanted him to live. Voicing our concerns all our lives got us nowhere; it wasn’t until he was ready that he made the changes he needed. I’ve been struggling a lot with loss the last year. Loss of family members, romantic relationships, friendships, etc. It’s been the most loss I’ve felt back-to-back. So much that I had to start taking Zoloft just to keep my head above water. Do I sometimes want to numb out or dig a giant hole and jump into it where I can feel safe and free of the harms of life? Yeah. Yet, I’m still here surviving and pushing my way through, one day at a time, even when it feels like I’m in a thick fog that I can’t see the end of. I love my dad, genuinely. I’m glad to have him here now. Do I want him to also live forever? Yeah, that would be nice.

My dad moved to my city a couple of months ago, at my urging. He’s 86. His wife of twenty years (not my mother) died of Covid shortly after the pandemic began. Just a shocking loss. Since then, I’ve felt intensely protective of him, which is not an orientation that he understands or appreciates. In many ways over these last few years, he’s seemed like a teenager to me. He’s been able-bodied enough. Impulsive without any vision for the consequences of his actions. Resistant to entreaties to take certain precautions or think things through. 

And now that he lives here, rather than putting my mind at ease, my mind and my heart are SCREAMING. I see him diminishing before my eyes. I also feel like a hurt kid when I spend time with him. He doesn’t seem much interested in me. (And maybe he never was. I can’t remember.)

I vacillate wildly between sadness and rage. There’s also the guilt, ever-present. None of this seems sensible, much of it indefensible, and yet it’s where I am right now. I don’t have a scrap of wisdom or insight at this moment. Just pain and this weird companion I guess I’ll call faith, which is that I will, with the help of a bigger world, learn and grow from this chapter. I’m already grateful for the emotional depth of it. But also afraid: afraid that I’m fucking this up, afraid that he’ll drop dead and I won’t have been wholehearted. I’m not sure what I mean by that — whole hearted — but I know it’s what I want.

Horrible thought #32

I wish my mother would accidentally (or on purpose) overdose on the enormous amount of pills she has access to.

I’m doing okay with her. This week.

My mother is difficult. I don’t throw the word narcissist around lightly but she is. Childhood abuse from a stepfather she refused to protect me from. Horrible stuff, too extensive to list. 

I’m essentially her only caregiver. I hate it. But I’m getting better at it.

I’ve worked the steps the best I can. I pray the “God save me from being angry” prayer daily. Try to see her as a sick person. Agree with her. Keep conversation to a minimum. I have learned to NOT automatically step in, and instead insist that she ask for help when she needs it. I never, ever, ever answer the phone when she calls; I always call her back, even if it’s 30 seconds later. That somehow gives me a tiny amount of agency. And gives her a tiny boundary.

Even though I can, I refuse to read her mind. I refuse to overperform in an effort to, at last, get love and approval from her. It won’t happen (she fakes it when she wants something), and it drives me crazy, thinking, “This time she gets it!” I set boundaries on what behavior I will tolerate and stick to them.

As I said, I’m good this week. Next week I’ll be in a puddle, sobbing alone on my bathroom floor. This too shall fucking pass.

Oh! And it’s okay to hate her sometimes. In fact, sometimes that’s the healthiest thing one can do.

My dad was an alcoholic from before I was born. I didn’t know that when I was young, as he had a good job and never drank at work. He drank in the evening and on weekends but rarely got out of hand. 

As the 5th child of eventually 14, I saw a good man who drank a bit too much. My youngest siblings saw a much different man. 

He retired early with a buyout offer and was then free to drink all day every day! I was already about 4 years sober; he was proud of me but refused to face his own demons.

My remembrance of his earlier days frequently sparks resentment from a couple of my youngest brothers and sisters. I understand and respect their feelings. Having sponsored many members with similar experiences, I see how hard it is for some to forgive. I just try to encourage them to see their parent as a sick person just as they are, not as the demon they were.

My dad has diabetes and dementia and he lives with my older sister. I often travel the six-hour drive to spend time with him. A few months ago, he wanted me to get him ketchup out of the fridge. I was in the process of scrambling him some eggs, so I said, you can get up and “Get it yourself, Dad. I’m at the stove.” As he walked to the fridge, he said, “God, you can be such a bitch sometimes.” My eleven-year old nephew was at the table. He gathered his robot bits and absconded upstairs. 

I generally know better than to let dementia behaviors trip me up, but calling me a bitch was brand new. It hit me surprisingly hard. I said, “You may not call me names,” and that was the end of it. (I did later have a convo with my nephew too, just to make sure he was ok.) 

But I was TRIGGERED with all caps. I’ve survived severe partner abuse, and my own struggles with substances have always been linked with abuse. Abuse that came from men who were “not in their right mind” because of their own addiction or mental health issues. As in, no accountability, ever.

I went to the gym and beat the shit out of a heavy bag. The part of me that wanted to never see Dad again was the same part that had helped me escape being abused. The part of me that knew I would have to go back into that house and keep taking care of him felt all twisted up with the part of me that had endured being treated badly in the past. It was so, so sticky. It took me two days to get my nervous system to calm down. To feel some real grief for the person Dad used to be, and to accept that at least for now, there is going to be another man in my life who may be allowed to occasionally be a fucking asshole to me because he’s unwell.

My parents didn’t grow up finding healthy coping skills, or picking up tools for dealing with “hard” aspects of life. The best they can do is ignore, hope the anxiety dies down, and move on, focusing on something “positive.”

My role in childhood was to help them project that everything was okay, to the outside world, but also to each other.

There is so much here to dig into, and I’m so grateful to everyone who shares in AA and ACA circles to support my growth, clarity, and six years, 7 months, 29 days of recovery.

But the current result is an uncomfortable tangle in which they have decided to live 10 hours away, in an isolated neighborhood, requiring lots of driving to get services and even basic day-to-day necessities, with no plan for acknowledging or navigating the new cascade of aging challenges they’re sometimes describing to me, or trying to lie about and cover up. Oh, and of course, they’re still drinking.

My Mom’s take when she slipped into a neutral moment while talking about her friend moving into assisted living: “We’ll probably just die in our beds. Or, something will happen and we’ll have to go to the hospital, and then we’ll just die there.” When I offered that there may be a middle ground to cover, she got quiet and agreed. And then immediately changed the subject, with a sunny inflection in her voice, to signal that I had gotten too close to something scary, which should be left well in the dark where it belonged.

So. What comes up for me is the childhood anxiety response and overachieving drive. The voice that says I’m failing them if I don’t do more, help more, show up more often. The sadness that they aren’t going to “get it”; the joy of being present, and real, and engaged in the full spectrum of life. The grief of feeling abandoned. I’m just doing my best to choose how I want to show up in relation and take it one day at a time with honesty and integrity. 

fin

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BONUS:

by Elissa Altman

Over the course of 25 years, my mother called me 91,250 times; that’s ten times a day. I almost always answered, worried that she had fallen. When she screamed that I was a piece of shit, I’d listen for a while before hanging up; minutes later, she'd call back with a story about singing in the fifties at the Copa with Barbara Feldon. I love you honey, she’d say.

My mother lived with clinically-diagnosed NPD, and after her second husband drank himself to death, I, as her only child, became her financial support, caregiver, and stand-in spouse, making her safety my job. Her illness had always been part of our lives, and when I lived in her den for two years after college, I coped by sneaking glasses of cheap Soave in the middle of the night, and hiding them in the closet until her morning screaming began again.

During Covid, my mother, at eighty-five and on Medicaid, moved in with my wife and me for four months. After she left, I discovered that she had been calling Saks when bored, and binge-shopping makeup. I locked down her credit card, withstood her fury, and got a call from APS informing me that I was under investigation for withholding life essentials from her, but they eventually closed the case when she explained that the essentials were lipstick. Two months later, I contracted Covid and suffered a mild brain stem stroke; the virus, caregiver stress, and a nightly bottle of wine had caused a blood pressure spike. By then, I had been attending Zoom recovery meetings and seeing a therapist who suggested I go into rehab. I made the calls but never went because what if she needed me? My mother died in October 2025, after a catastrophic fall. When we emptied her den closet, I expected to find it: a wine goblet covered with forty years of dust and evaporated Soave. But it was gone, likely found by her long ago, washed, and quietly put back on the bar cart. She never said a word. 

— a 350-word excerpt from Elissa’s 2019 book Motherland. Join her Substack here.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN