Your Aging Parent Doesn't Want Help: the Relationship You're Losing Inside Caregiving

Your mother stopped telling you things. You can't say exactly when it happened, but it's been a while.Somewhere in the last few years, the Tuesday call turned into a symptom screen. "How are you" became a way of asking about her medications. The visit ends in a Costco run for things she's been buying herself for forty years. Then last March she fell in her kitchen, and you didn't find out until three weeks later, on a Sunday phone call, in a Trader Joe's parking lot.She told her best friend Carol the day it happened. Carol came over with a coffee cake.This is not a caregiving book. There are forty caregiving books and most of them are good. This is the book about something they do not cover.This is a book about the relationship you didn't notice you were losing inside the caregiving, and how to get it back without dropping a single grab bar.In nine short chapters, Your Aging Parent Doesn't Want Your Help will show you: - Why your parent is calling her friend now and not you- What the project-manager voice sounds like in your own head- How to stop screening her for symptoms when you ask how she is- The visit she actually wants- How to apologize without apologizing for caringFor the adult son or daughter whose parent is still living independently, with her own home, her own friends, and her own life, and who is doing everything right, calling every Tuesday, and getting a colder phone call back every Sunday.

Pagina's: 78, Paperback, Independently published