Why I Wrote This Book
That Christmas vacation, when I first caught sight of my folks and saw how much they had aged, and then saw the dirt and disorder that had taken over their formerly immaculate home, I knew two things. The first was that my parents needed assistance. But almost as clearly, I saw that I, too, would need help, and lots of it.
Although I had no idea then how much help I’d need or where that help would come from, I did sense that something very different was happening and that major changes were ahead. As events unfolded, that prediction proved alarmingly accurate. It was a life-changing moment, and neither I nor Mom and Dad would ever be quite the same again.
My parents, Lillian and Jack Wolf, were then eighty-five years old and living as they always had—in their home, “independently.” But I was no longer their teenage daughter doing my homework down the hall. I’d grown up and moved a continent away many years before. Recently, in midlife, I’d returned to graduate school in order to begin a second career. Earlier that winter, I was very busy building my new practice as a psychotherapist, working with seniors and their families. I’d been excited to share all about that with my parents.
You might imagine that someone with my background would have been better at predicting that my parents and I would have “some accommodating” to do as we all aged. Somehow, I’d managed to plan ahead for very little of that and instead lived with, in hindsight, a surprising level of denial. The bald truth was that I was an only child and my folks were octogenarians who lived thousands of miles away from me. What could possibly go wrong?
Although it seems unimaginable that my parents would conceal their health or other problems from me, it’s not at all uncommon for older parents to do so. Like Jack and Lillian, many of your parents might have fears of the unknown consequences of “inviting” their family in to help them and, instead, resort to hiding things from you. Once I saw for myself what was really happening with my folks, I had to play catch-up, not having planned as well as I could have nor dealt with my nagging concerns for their health.
When I got past my initial reaction I was able to take a breath. By doing that, I found I could respond rather than react: one of the first tools of good parenting, as it turns out. Then I was able to look more deeply. I discovered that my parents’ needs were vast and pressing. It became apparent that I would need to not only make sense of what was happening medically but also step in to deal with a whole laundry list of nonmedical issues for them. Before long, I was wishing I could have taken care of things earlier, but I at least recognized that I now had to try to solve problems that, even a day before, I hadn’t considered to be mine.
When I found a few moments to come up for air, I instinctively turned to books and
the internet, my usual sources for comprehensive information and perspective. I was
searching for an “expert” to tell me how to become a more caring and involved daughter
at this time of my parents’ life. As a specialist myself in the field of geriatric
psychotherapy, I was familiar with the literature on aging, death, and loss. I’d always
regretted that there wasn’t a really good book—not even a helpful magazine article
on “raising” older parents, nothing useful on television or the web—to recommend to
my patients as they traversed the journey my parents and I now apparently had begun.
In the past, I’d wanted to offer
“biblio-therapy”[1]—intelligent, empathic literature—to further help my patients steer their courses
during this part of life.
Now it was I who was feeling confused, lonely, and bereft: I needed guidance of my own!
I was beginning to understand that I would need to take on a different role with Jack and Lillian, one requiring the skills and qualities I generally associated with good parenting. I was desperately seeking some smart professor’s book or reputable organization’s research study to help me make sense of what this new role and my new job would entail. But nothing was out there. I considered that perhaps this new relationship with my parents was, in fact, all about parenting. This was a new type of parenting, however, parenting that appeared in a radically different context. It was “parenting” by adult children who had “turned it around” by deciding to care for elderly parents who, so long ago, had cared for them.
I could even see ahead to the day when this role reversal would be fully realized: many of us would quite naturally be “Parenting Our Parents” (or “doing POP,” for short). It was then that I first came to realize for the first time that the book I was so longing for was one I might actually need to write. I would write it to guide me and you and hopefully to mentor generations through the phase of a hitherto-unnamed twenty-first-century developmental stage of life I called the POPcycle.
The term “POPcycle” describes with eerie precision what happened over time in my family and what occurs in most other families. The POPcycle starts when the older generation begins to cede some decision-making and control to those in the younger generation, the adult children who simultaneously find themselves taking on more and more responsibility for many aspects of their aging parents’ (and other beloved relatives’) lives.
Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care[2] famously comforted generations of young parents, starting with my own, by educating them to the predictable stages of their children’s developmental cycle. Similarly, the popular What to Expect When You’re Expecting[3] was heralded by decades of soon-to-be parents for guiding them through the developmental stages of pregnancy.
I saw that what people parenting their parents needed was such a book for our generation’s new “assignment.” What I’d tried so hard to find unsuccessfully was a handbook to guide me through the hardest parenting challenge of all: “POParenting” or parenting those people who’d raised me. I would have been overjoyed to have even found a magazine about parenting our parents, like the dozens I’d seen for parenting our kids. I still vividly recall my aloneness and yearning for connection, community, and a book that would include but also go beyond a simple “how-to” book approach. My patients and I needed something to guide us beyond the activities of basic caregiving, picking up prescriptions, and creating viable health care proxies. We needed a book that would help us find the meaning, healing, and joy of doing POP.
What I saw I also needed was a book that would address the overwhelming emotions both sides of those in the POPcycle so often reported feeling. For the middle-agers, there is an incredible sense of aloneness, as if we were the only ones doing POP; there are fears associated with not doing it right and often there are old or current family resentments that make POParenting particularly challenging. And for the senior parents, there is a fear of losing our independence and “voice,” of the loneliness associated with the death of mates and friends, and often the emotional and physical readjustments that accompany “leaving home.”
Some of my patients who were the most interested in a comprehensive book were elder patients themselves. Appreciating that their bodies and minds and their relationships with their adult children were changing, savvy seniors wanted to educate themselves—as well as their children—about how to best navigate the POPcycle they would be sharing. They wanted four books, one for themselves and three more for their grown offspring, they’d tell me.
Still hoping I could find someone else’s book, I aimed to find a memoir that might illustrate a micro-view, something up close and personal I could learn from. I’d thought that maybe by reading another person’s story, I could more easily create the vision of how to do POP in my own family. At other times, I’d wanted to locate a treatise on “How to Care for Your Mom and Dad While Still Having Your Own Life” to better balance my new POP responsibilities on top of everything else already on my plate. How was this going to work: adding Jack and Lillian’s concerns to my existing stressors, to everyone else competing for my time and attention? I’d also wanted to find something with a macro-view, as if I were standing up high on a movie director’s crane. From there, maybe I could better “oversee” POP for the phenomenon it had become, something being replicated in millions of homes across this nation and beyond, but especially in the United States with our seemingly shrinking “safety net” beneath America’s aging families.
I wondered: If I, with my years of geriatric training and experience, was feeling so lonely and “clueless,” how would someone without all my background and expertise cope?
Eventually, I knew that the only way to have such a resource for others was to sit down and write the book I’d so desperately wanted but never been able to find. My intention in doing so was to make your Parenting Our Parents (POP) experience and that of many others easier, more comprehensible and, yes, more enjoyable than mine had been for me.
Since that attention-grabbing Christmas in 1997, when my family’s POPcycle began, of course an awful lot has occurred. You and I now have the internet and the electronic world, replacing books for many as their primary source of information. The web’s capability to instantaneously and continuously connect us to each other as well as vast quantities of information has created extraordinary opportunities, ones with potential to bring together and invigorate communities online. Hmmm . . . my wheels continued to turn.
While working on this book, my concern for the fragmented and fragile social net under our nation’s most susceptible demographic, our seniors, continued to grow. I began to see an expanded vision, one far bigger than any single family’s journey. I came to realize that those of us doing POP needed even more than a really good book. What we also required, it seemed, was a POP community, a movement that would provide momentum, energy, and involvement. The support of others could successfully equip us to fulfill the enormous responsibilities and accomplish the tasks of POP, of parenting our own parents.
I began to imagine: What if those who choose to complete the Circle of Life by Parenting Our Parents, create our own POP community? A POP community would help us “support ourselves” and our fellow POParents as well. It could offer us information, advice, inspiration, and online invitations to events. It could show us how to “do POP” by giving us examples, provide us models of good (or not-so-good) POParenting to learn from. Maybe the government wouldn’t need to set up new institutions or provide additional benefits if we created a POP community that worked well enough to yield our own safety net? I’d have been ecstatic to have discovered a way to “chat” online with others who, like me, who were wide awake at 3 a.m. trying to figure out how to install grab bars before our parents returned from their postsurgical rehabilitation the next day.
When you’re next awake at 3 a.m. worrying about your parents and how you’ll best cope, no one from the government will be by your side helping to solve your latest POP problem. Now, however, you’ll possess two other very useful things close by. You will have your copy of this book, Parenting Our Parents: Transforming This Challenge into a Journey of Love and you’ll have your own friends and POP community at www.ParentingOurParents.org.
The website is based on the premise that all of us doing POP have much to teach and much to learn from each other, and we all do some of each—teaching and learning—in the POP community. At the website, you’ll have access to extraordinary POParents 24/7. POParents are people from families like yours, working to make this a time of safety, healing, order, and joy for everyone involved. The POP community consists of geriatric “experts” and compassionate POParents, people like you and me, interested in healing the wounds of our past and creating loving family experiences in our present and for our future.
Writing this book presented “impediments” that were unknown to me when I began, much like parenting my parents had done. One of my biggest challenges was publicly sharing the intimacies of my family’s POP journey. My folks had always guarded their privacy zealously, like so many of their generation. And even though my parents passed before this book was published, I sometimes felt that telling “My Story” revealed too much of our family’s “secrets.” Eventually, I came to realize that my parents would have been proud of me, as they always were, for using our family’s experiences to help others.
Another challenge is that customarily in the practice of my psychotherapy profession, it’s the patient revealing his or her life story, not the therapist revealing hers. I had to come to accept that I needed to step outside that comfortable “anonymous zone” and allow you to authentically know me and my family: by doing so, my words would gain real credibility in your eyes and therefore be of most help.
So why did I write this book and start this POP community? I did so because I wanted to support you and others like you in manifesting your vision of POP love and loyalty. By being part of this new POP community, we are positively altering the face and character of our nation in how we treat our aging population. Should this book and the POP community help you transform your family relationships into ones you’ve always wanted, you and I will have made a significant contribution to there being more joy in your life and the lives of your loved ones and our nation.
That is, healing work done by reading books, articles, and magazines.
Benjamin Spock, revised and updated by Robert Needlman, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, eighth edition (New York: Pocket Books, 2004).
Originally published in 1984 and consistently on the best-seller list. Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, fifth edition (New York: Workman, 2016).