BOOKS: Mothering Mother

"Profoundly touching and thought-provoking..."

* * THIS IS AN AFFILIATE LINK -- meaning, if you click the link (above or below), and you end up buying the product based on this review, a few pennies will go to support this site. It's a great way to show your support for The Rebel Housewife -- Thank you! * *

MOTHERING MOTHER:
A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
by Carol O'Dell
(Kunati, 2007)
Hardcover; 192 pgs; $19.95 U.S.

"The term "sandwich generation" is ridiculously inadequate to describe those of us caught between raising our own children and caring for an elderly parent. I've got a better one: the 'vice-grip generation'." (page 31)

"Mother is at this final stage during which we all reduce to our own cosmic juice and revert back to some pretty potent pulp. She is no longer interested in betterment, learning or growing. She is tart, almost bitter, and that makes it hard to want to spend time with her. She doesn't seem to have the ability or inclination to be nice. It's all about her now, and it doesn't matter whether I have a hangnail or a tumor; it wouldn't register." (page 27)

Wow, this was a tough one. There comes a time, in nearly everyone's life, when we have to face aging, mortality and responsibility head-on, as our parents get older. I didn't think about it much, until recently, and now I think about it a lot.

My father died many years ago, so I will never have the responsibility, or the opportunity, to care for my father in old age. Long before his death, he and my mother divorced, and she has been alone ever since, working and raising three children on her own. When my grandparents needed help, she was at a place in her life, newly-retired with children grown and gone, where she could help. She went to live with them in their home in California (from Seattle) to take care of her father, who died of lung cancer, and then settle her mother in a retirement home. By then, my grandmother was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease. It was a very difficult time for my mother. It is a daunting and most often thankless task to care for an aging parent.

Almost two decades later, my mother is in her early seventies, and the time is coming, I'm not sure how rapidly, when she will need help, when she won't be able to be as alone and independent as she has always preferred. It is not an easy thing to talk about, to ask questions, to have any idea of what might happen, when, or what we'll do when the time comes.

Carol O' Dell's solution was to bring her 89-year-old adoptive mother, suffering from Parkinson's and heart disease, into her home and try to settle her and care for her, at the same time trying to balance her own life and responsibilities to her husband and their two teenage daughters, not to mention her own self and sanity.

Mothering Mother is O'Dell's "humorous and heartbreaking memoir" in journal format through the last three years of her mother's life. This is not a fun or easy book to read. These are things we don't want to think about, but eventually have to, and it helps to have a guidebook, the benefit of someone else's experience and hard-won wisdom. It is the writer's gift to face challenges head-on; to write through the darkness for survival and sanity; and to share the adventure.

O'Dell is a naturally skilled and talented writer, with the ability to document her mother's decline and her own emotions and turmoil in brutal honesty, with often shocking detail, and yet, there is humor here, even at the worst moments, and love overall. Mothering Mother is profoundly touching and thought-provoking.

"If you are considering home care for an infirm or elderly dependent, Mothering Mother is a not-to-be-missed memoir and helpful "how-to." [I would say "how-to-survive."]