When I sat down to write a column about Gen X caring for our aging parents, I had many false starts. Did I want to write about how my friends and I discuss our parents’ reverse milestones (“Can he still drive at night?”) like we did with our babies (“Is he walking yet?”). Should I offer some practical advice about making sure you have power of attorney? Do I spotlight the excellent local resources from the Belmont Council on Aging (www.beechstreetcenter.org)?
None of these approaches feel adequate for such a big, messy topic. It’s a tangle of physical, mental, and financial concerns complicated by a lifetime of parent-child dynamics. Those of us lucky enough to have parents still in our lives are caught in a delicate dance of transitioning to be the caretaker — sometimes even the authority figure — for our aging parents.
My own parents now spend fall months in Belmont. They’re regulars at many of the Cushing Square restaurants, and on Fridays they take the Belmont Council on Aging van (adorably named the Belderbus) to the Beech Street Center for a chair yoga class.
I’m grateful to have them close enough that I have a sense of their day-to-day lives. But balancing their needs with those of my teenager, husband, and job can be challenging. Sometimes I even carve out a moment for myself to see friends, exercise, or binge “Love is Blind” on Netflix, but I always feel a pang of guilt. Should I have made sure my dad got outside that day or checked if my mom needed groceries?
When I see my friends in similar situations, I’m able to be more generous and see that we are all doing our best in an impossible situation. Jessica S. moved her 88-year-old father, Tom, into her apartment near Payson Park about 10 years ago. Though they’ve always been close, the last few years have grown more challenging.
“He’s pretty much deaf, and I’m usually exhausted from work,” she said. “About the only thing we can connect over is cute animal videos.”
Jessica comes home for lunch from her job in Cambridge every day to check on Tom and manage his medications, but she wishes she had more time to find resources for him. At least she knows they can have a good laugh over a video of “tuxedo cat lounging in fruit bowl” or “dachshund puppy climbing stairs.”
Pia Owens, a lawyer, mediator, and author of the newsletter Negotiation for the Rest of Us, recently shared her own story of helping her parents downsize to a new apartment. “Negotiating [buying an apartment] FOR them was relatively easy … but WITH them took all my skills,” she explains.
I want my parents to consider an assisted living community, but when we visit them they look around and say, “This place is full of old people!” Do I snap, “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Maybe. But then I take three deep breaths and think of working together on our shared problem.
Pia’s advice is to focus on our shared goal — keeping our parents safe and comfortable. She also offers this tough truth: their happiness is not our responsibility. Our role is to support their choices, not control them.
Ouch. For a devoted people pleaser like me, it’s pretty stark to see this simple truth spelled out. While I keep repeating it, I confess it hasn’t quite sunk in. I’ll still skip my yoga class to take my dad to watch the dogs from his favorite bench at Fresh Pond.
We will all continue to do our best with an unmanageable issue, but also try to forgive ourselves for what we can’t control. We will replay “tuxedo cat lounging in fruit bowl” as many times as it takes.
Jessica Barnard works at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She is a former employee of Grub Street Writers and is secretly writing a romance novel in her spare time. Jessica received her MA in English from the Harvard Extension School in 2021, so even as a Gen X-er, she can relate to the Zoom graduation generation. While originally from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Jessica has lived in Belmont for 15 years with her husband and two children.