Daughterhood Blog

July 6, 2016October 26, 2017 by Anne Tumlinson

Creating a Resilient Response to Loss: The Special Challenge of Dementia

I’ve said many times that few things are more disorienting than the shift from being cared for by your parents to caring for your parents. The only thing that makes it harder is when your parent (or spouse) has dementia. This is quite possibly the most challenging of all situations.

Every Sunday, I allow myself the pleasure of spending time on Krista Tippett’s website, www.onbeing.org. A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled onto a podcast entitled, “The Myth of Closure” with family therapist Pauline Boss.

She’s coined the phrase “ambiguous loss,” which I find revelatory. Ambiguous loss refers to “a loss that is unclear, that has no resolution or closure”…. Where a loved one’s “status as absent or present remains hazy.”

June 22, 2016February 1, 2018 by Anne Tumlinson

What to Do When Your Best Efforts Aren’t Good Enough

My neighbor George is not a daughter but he’s certainly part of the daughterhood. You see, until a year ago, he spent most of his time taking care of his parents in the home they shared.

Now, from my perspective, he was the best kind of son any parents could hope to have and he fully embodied the spirit of honoring your mother and father.

But from his perspective, he was constantly failing.

Once he relayed a story to me about how he was in the kitchen one night making dinner for his parents – both bed bound in different rooms upstairs. As he’s running the food trays up and down the stairs, as he did for every meal, suddenly his mother calls out, “Come sit with me.”

in Assisted Living / End-of-Life / Feeling Guilty / Feeling Overwhelmed / Navigating Change and Letting Go / Uncategorized 6 comments

June 10, 2016June 10, 2016 by Anne Tumlinson

A Daughter’s Guide to Hiring the Right Aging Care Professional

Recently when I was talking to a friend about daughterhood, she asked me, “Why isn’t there someone I can pay to help me figure out how to get the best care for my mom? You know, someone who can help me navigate the system.”

That’s a really good question. There are, in fact, many different types of professionals you can hire to help out when your parent needs care.

One problem, though, is that, many of the daughters I know are reluctant to pay out of pocket for –- sometimes expensive –- professionals to perform tasks that they feel they should be able to do themselves.

in Uncategorized 6 comments

May 3, 2016March 20, 2020 by Anne Tumlinson

Are You Ready to Make Healthcare Decisions for Your Parents? Six Steps to Prepare You Now

A reality of our healthcare system is that it’s really good at keeping people alive way past the point that they’re aware of being alive.

As a result, our parents stand a good chance of ending up in either a healthcare crisis or end-of-life situation where they can’t speak for themselves or make the big decisions that will determine the course of their treatment.

That means YOU are the person who will likely have to make these very hard decisions on their behalf. No pressure, right?

Clearly, this is a LOT of pressure. So, the question is: How do you get ready? You may have already heard about things like advance directives, living wills, doctor’s orders, power of attorney, healthcare proxy, and on and on. All the things that people SHOULD do to prepare for advanced illness and end-of-life.

The problem is it’s all really intimidating and more than a little bit overwhelming.

in End-of-Life 0 comments

April 19, 2016February 7, 2018 by Anne Tumlinson

3 Strategies to Overcome the Most Stressful Part of Daughterhood

There is almost nothing in life more stressful than feeling like you are 100 percent responsible for a situation over which you have zero control.

This is happening a lot these days in my house because somehow, somewhere, my daughter has grown into a teenager and I’ve lost control of all but the biggest decisions in her life.

At least she’s my daughter and I am nominally in charge. So as stressful as it is, it’s only a fraction of the stress women face when they feel like they’re entirely responsible for their parents’ health and safety, but, at the same time, have no control over their parents behavior or the choices they make.

This is a recipe for a nervous breakdown — when you have all of the responsibility but none of the authority!

in Navigating Change and Letting Go 13 comments

March 24, 2016June 13, 2016 by Anne Tumlinson

The 3 Unexpected Stages of Daughterhood

I have spent the last few weeks talking to new Daughterhood Circle leaders. And, even though they live all over the country – from New Jersey to North Carolina to Texas and Minnesota — it’s AMAZING how many of the things they experience are exactly the same.

I mean it’s uncanny how similarly our leaders talk about their lives! Just within a couple of days, (I swear this is true) I talked to two women — both caring for their mothers at home and simultaneously raising kids — and they each talked about how much it means to them to be taking care of their mothers. And, then… each one of them, separately used these exact words:

“Sometimes, though, I have to go out to the backyard and scream.”

You can picture women all over America standing in their kitchens coaxing teenagers to do homework, trying to get their 85-year-old-moms-with-dementia to eat, and, in their calmest voice, they’re like, “excuse me a minute everyone” and off they go outside to just have a Moment.

in Common Challenges / Feeling Overwhelmed 5 comments

March 9, 2016June 13, 2016 by Anne Tumlinson

The 4 Most Frequently Asked Questions About Medicaid Home Care

I love hearing from readers. Sometimes they write to tell me that a particular blog has helped them and that makes me very happy.

But a lot of the time, they tell me about problems that aren’t easily solved and ask questions that aren’t easily answered. Here’s one I get in many different variations that breaks my heart.

“My mom has some income from social security and less than $10,000 in savings. I’ve got a full time job I need to keep. Mom was doing fine until recently – but now she’s in and out of the hospital and having trouble taking care of herself. My sister and I are worried and wondering what we do next.”

in Home Care / Medicaid 6 comments

February 10, 2016April 5, 2018 by Anne Tumlinson

4 Things You Can Do to Make Caregiving Less Tedious

I once had a therapist tell me that I had “the most disordered thinking” of anyone he had ever seen. In light of this diagnosis, I probably deserve a gold medal for getting out of bed most mornings.

My secret to staying semi-sane is to keep really, really busy and to surround myself with lots of people. For someone like me, being bored is deadly.

And, I am going to admit something that I think maybe none of us would say out loud. I find that taking care of other people, whether they are 2 or 102, can often be really boring. I mean, reaalllllyyy TEDIOUS.

I am, for example, not particularly tolerant of caregiving situations that require me to demonstrate a lot of physical strength while being screamed at, and then to have to repeat the whole thing over and over again. I am pretty sure that wrestling a tantruming 2 year old into a car seat looks very similar to some of the exercises they do at Army ranger training.

in Feeling Guilty 4 comments

January 26, 2016June 13, 2016 by Anne Tumlinson

Essential Websites for the Daughterhood Journey

These days you can barely open up your internet browser without stumbling across a website for caregivers. On the one hand, this is great but it can also be a problem — There are so many websites with advice and information for caregivers that it can be hard sometimes to find what you need or to even know where to start.

So I want to share some of my favorite sites, organized by topic — in the hopes that you can get what you need more easily.

But before I do, please promise me that you won’t let all these websites and the information they provide make you feel MORE overwhelmed than you already feel. You don’t have to consume it all in one sitting and you don’t need it all right now.

in Resources 30 comments

December 17, 2015April 12, 2018 by Anne Tumlinson

5 Lessons in Setting Boundaries that Every Caregiver Must Learn

It seems like I’ve been exhausted for 20 years. In just the last few months I’ve been waking up to the realization that this fatigue is the direct result of much-too-loose personal and professional boundaries. I’ve spent so much time and energy in my life doing things that I can’t or don’t want to do –that I am just plain tired.

There’s an epidemic of “can’t say no” among the women I know. But, I think it’s especially difficult for daughters – to say no to a parent who wants to move in, to say no to unreasonable requests from siblings or paid caregivers, or to bow out of community obligations that are just too much on top of caregiving demands.

As a caregiver, it’s essential that you become an expert in setting boundaries. Boundaries are the flip side of asking for help. And if you can do both… if you can learn to say, “No” and “I need your help,” you might just survive this experience.

in Common Challenges / Feeling Guilty / Feeling Overwhelmed / Navigating Change and Letting Go 103 comments