she ran her first 5K at seventy.
When I speak with my friends these days, the topic of our parents is a common one, whether a simple update on their health or a longer discussion about a particularly troubling challenge. Having watched one parent die two years ago after battling dementia and multiple strokes and now watching another parent struggle with a disease that stole her ability to easily walk or open a water bottle virtually overnight, I know that these years can be the hardest years, both for our parents and for us.
But with the obligation of caring for a parent comes opportunity. Becoming a parent to our parents is incredibly hard and pulls on our emotional resources and sometimes our physical and financial ones as well. It isn’t easy for parent or child to reverse roles (in some respects – my mother is still quite clear on her matriarchal status!) For a child, we see our life anchor struggle in ways we never imagined. Suddenly we become all too aware of our parents’ mortality and our own. Yes, we are all grown up now – but the need for a parent’s love and support knows no age limit. For a parent, needing help from their child is literally turning the world on its head. Needing help at all feels awful; needing help from a child is the worst kind of awful. Change is never easy and it is all too easy for emotions to flare at random moments for unclear reasons. Perhaps it is simply that all of us are scared.
But it is because our respective roles have to shift that there is a chance to define a new relationship with our parents, to create a bond that is the bond between two adults that is not tainted by missteps that often still linger in the complex emotional dance between parent and child. I am closer today to my mother than I have ever been in my life. We will always be mother and daughter.
But we also speak as two adult women who have lived lives filled with a host of both challenges and triumphs. As I have watched her fight her disease with everything she has, I have been awed by her courage and resilience. At 86, it would be easy for her to simply give in to the disease, to see it as a harbinger of the end. But she never does. She maintains dignity and grace in the face of a disease that works very hard to take those things away. My mother has grit. And I am so very, very proud to be her daughter.
The relationship my mother and I have created is very much our own and I will keep it that way. So I will simply say that sometimes even tragedy can bring gifts if we look hard enough.
My mother ran her first 5K at seventy. I didn’t appreciate the significance of her accomplishment back then – I was focused on my own life 3,000 miles away and my mother was going to be here forever. At 84, my mother was diagnosed with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP, the chronic form of Guillain-Barre Syndrome). At 86, on a “girls staycation,” my mother announced “I feel like running.” Today I live across the street from my mother and understand the amazing accomplishment each one of her steps is and, perhaps even more so, each one of her smiles.
#CIDP isn’t keeping her from showing off her #strut!