How Caring for Aging Parents Affects a Career

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/how-caring-for-aging-parents-affects-a-career/279584/



Having chosen the child-free life, I didn’t expect that caring for loved ones would play any significant role in my career path. But I didn’t factor in my mom and dad. Like many in my generation, I never fully considered the potential need to care for my aging parents.

Foregoing children was a complicated, difficult decision for me. It was riddled with fears about my parenting abilities, an irrational terror of labor pains, and the reality that I simply never felt ready. But once the decision was behind me, I enjoyed my marriage and career largely unfettered, supportive of my colleagues with kids, yet never imagining that I’d experience anything like the comings and goings of maternity leave that presented them with so many challenges. That is, until my parents began to age.

My father’s health was the first to go. Congestive heart failure made heart attacks an almost annual event. I found myself bolting out of meetings and onto flights from San Francisco to Boston in response to my mother’s hysterical, long-distance calls saying, “This is it!” Over 10 years of these 911 alerts, during which my dad also underwent a number of complex surgeries, I became that colleague who cries wolf. Though my co-workers were always supportive, I saw slight eye-rolls each time I had to try to do my job from 3,000 miles away because my dad had been hospitalized and was on his deathbed. Again.

Next, my wonderful, imperfect parents began escalating minor logistical messes into major crises. They had a nasty fight with a company they’d hired to paint their kitchen cabinets. They got embroiled in a permitting problem with the city they were moving to. When my father caused a scene over whether lunch menu prices at a local pizza parlor were still valid after 3 p.m. and was told never to return, my mother became more concerned than ever that he’d definitively lost it.

[BlueToTheBone]

1. When my mother became very old and sick

we relocated our company across the country so that I wouldn't have to keep making those mad airplane dashes. I am very happy that we made that decision and that I was able to be with my mother and help her in her last years and to be with her when she died. But it did take a toll. The business slid, we gained debt because I wasn't paying attention to work; we are now fighting a counterfeit company who took advantage of my distractions and began copying our products and selling them. What a mess this is!

But the bottom line for me is that I am glad I made the decision to be closer and to take care of Mama.

[pintobean]

2. It certainly takes a lot of stamina

and sacrifice. What really gets me is the lack of understanding from others. "Why don't you just put her in a nursing home?" As if someone you have loved all your life is disposable if their existence becomes a difficulty. My parents were always there for their children and grandchildren. Believe me, most of us were a difficulty. No one is disposable.

[pipoman]

4. Equating a nursing facility to a trash receptacle

is ridiculous. I have seen many people who's children refused to utilize professional assistance for their parents which resulted in torturous conditions for the parents because the children didn't know how, or have the time to care for them....others don't use facilities because of their own greed. Of coarse there are some who get the better care at home...depending on the health conditions of the parent and the skill of the child..they are fewer and farther between than people know, imo..

[pintobean]

5. That wasn't my point.

My mom ended up spending the last year of her life in a nursing home because her health problems became too much for us to handle. It is a wonderful facility. I was saying that people advised me to put her in a nursing home to make my problems go away, not because they thought it would be best for mom.

[pipoman]

6. oic

[pipoman]

3. A bit off topic...

those who choose not to have children often never put "the decision was behind me". Working at a retirement community I know at least 2 couples who made that decision. Both couples now regret the decision by their own admissions. Not to say everyone will regret it, I just believe that many who make that choice later wish they had not.

In as much as the decision not to have children was their decision, so is living 3,000 miles away from their parents..

[CrispyQ]

7. What good is a government that doesn't take care of it's citizens?

Our government should provide these things for every citizen at no charge:

three hots & a cot
healthcare
child/elder care
education, K-college
a comprehensive public transportation system

We have no right to claim being a civilized nation until we do this. It just blows my mind that Nixon suggested a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. Nixon. It wasn't much, but it was thinking in the right direction.

[Romulox]

8. This woman was the business co-owner. It was SHE who failed to provide any medical leave.

If she didn't provide for any leave for herself, what of her employees? They likely suffered in silence, no essay written (or read) about their suffering.

But we return to the point: the author was the business owner; it was she who failed to provide for any medical/family leave for employees and staff of her own company.

[riderinthestorm]

9. That jumped out at me. There's other pretty glaring redlights as well in her story

I'm not sure why she had to take multiple phone calls daily from her mother during work hours over things like a botched paint job? I'm thinking her fellow employees (that's when she wasn't self-employed) were doing more than "eye rolls"....

Her dad has annual heart attacks for 10 years and she nor her parents make any attempts to move closer to each other (even as her parents were embroiled in a permitting problem with the city they were moving to. during this time)?

And yeah, she goes on at the end about women scrambling about maternity leave, and family caretakers who have to take time off and never realizes that she hadn't implemented any of that for her own company. Nor does she seem to be advocating for that kind of family leave with impunity for employees - she just wants to vent her tale of woe.