by Amal Awad
‘What does it take to do what you’re doing, do you think?’ I ask, curious about his move from finance to a helper profession.
‘It goes back to empathy … It’s all about giving the other person a feel-good story for that moment in time, whether you’ve got them for one hour, or four hours, or thirty minutes.’
Em says he becomes a storyteller on the job; he’s always been one, even when dealing with clients in the finance realm. In a way, he is doing what Patty has talked about – meeting the person where they’re at, without putting pressure on them to be other than who they wish to be.
It complements what I hear from an Arab-Australian couple, Charlie* and Laura*, about drawing up a new dynamic. From children to friends. An approach that allows you to monitor your parents’ wellbeing while also strengthening bonds.
Charlie and Laura are parents themselves, in their thirties, and fit comfortably within the ‘sandwich generation’ – looking after parents and their own children, though they are not full-time carers. They fully expect to take on that role when the need arises, but for now it’s about keeping their parents active and engaged. Both believe caring demands ‘the feminine touch’, but as the eldest boy in his family Charlie feels compelled to step up. His attitude is a practical, easygoing one: there’s no sense of obligation or burden. ‘As a best mate would do … being there for one another, that’s what you’re trying to get to.’
This means, for Charlie, making sure his parents don’t fall victim to scammers who call them at home; that their bills are paid on time; and that they are engaged in a very ordinary way in each other’s days. He angles for a friendly conversation that will expose any issues. Asking direct questions is too much like a transaction. Inclusivity is also important for Charlie. Not belittling his parents and their ideas and opinions.
Charlie is seeing a greater need for this now. His mother is still fit and healthy; she can go about her daily business. ‘Health is a concern but easily measurable,’ he says.
Charlie lived with his parents until he married a few years ago. But the transition in their relationship from ‘transactional parenting’ to ‘friendship’ began about ten years ago, before he left home. His father, who is now in his seventies, worked as long as he could; his mother, who is in her sixties, was trying to re-skill herself, but also have hobbies, so she took TAFE courses in arts and crafts. But the reality of ‘some form of cycle of life that I don’t really understand’ was starting to dawn upon Charlie. ‘Parents are parents, but they’ve got to be friends [with their kids].’
He tried to boost their social life – dinners, get-togethers, travelling as a family, all foreign to his parents, who were focused on work and family duties, saving a future inheritance. It was a challenge to get them to engage in these social activities – to Charlie’s mind, his parents had already set their children up for the future by ensuring they had a good education. He’s not worried about inheriting their savings; he would rather his parents spend their money on themselves, taking well-earned holidays.
Charlie says, ‘My mum loves that sort of stuff, but the reality is she’s not going to do it by herself.’ His father wouldn’t stop her, he just wouldn’t join her and she would worry about him.
Charlie’s father experienced a late onset of diabetes in his forties. Then, twenty years ago, he underwent heart surgery. And now, he says, ‘You just start seeing things … my dad’s starting to notice it.’
A difficult thing to ignore is the death of people in your generation, or close to it. His father had several siblings and only one is still alive. ‘And he won’t admit it because he’ll stay strong … but I think there’s an element of him where … you can see it affects him.’
Laura expresses sadness that Charlie’s father jokes about not being around when their daughter gets married. ‘I’ll be long gone by then,’ he’ll say lightly.
‘That hurts me, so I don’t know how hard it would be for his own kids to hear things like that.’
‘And they thrive on still wanting to help us, as in the parenting 101,’ says Charlie.
‘They’re hanging for us to say, “Can you pick up the kids from school today? Can you take them to soccer? Can you take them to swimming?” And literally their calendars free up even if they had something on.’
‘Because they feel needed again,’ says Laura.
Meanwhile, Charlie’s dad is handy, cluey – an engineer, he was a business owner. If Charlie ever has something that needs repair, his father remains his go-to man. He wants to nurture a sense of ownership in his father’s life – when he comes over, Charlie wants his father to feel comfortable, like Charlie’s home is his own. It can be something as simple as watering the plants in their garden before Charlie and Laura have even got up for the day. Laura pipes up with more examples of Charlie making requests of his father – ‘A builder’s coming over tomorrow and I need you to do something’; ‘Can you please do my banking?’
Laura was horrified at first when she heard these requests from Charlie, and called him on it. ‘But the way he explained that to me was, “I need to do that for my dad because it’s good for him. I can do all this myself, but Dad now feels important.” And that was a lightbulb moment for me. I was like, “Oh, that makes sense now,” because he does feel important – he’s like, “Oh, my kids still need me, I’m still doing things that help them.”’
Being friends with their children means parents aren’t diminished in their child’s eyes. They are not obligations. They are parents, and although the dynamics between them and their children are shifting with their changing needs, Charlie’s approach to underplay that shift seems a constructive and positive approach.
‘I’ve done my part’
For some people, ‘meeting them where they’re at’ or being a friend to a parent is loaded with the troubling necessity to be there, period. There are threads to this. A dissonance of chords that can compound into a screech, far from a harmonic melody. The idea of obligation is a bloated one.
People I speak to reveal commonalities in their coping with parents’ frailty, with a body ravaged, a mind overcome by grief. In the same way doctors like to know exactly what conditions they’re dealing with in order to address them, carers seek information as a form of relief. If we know what we’re dealing with, we can do better.
Though knowing may offer a sliver of relief – symptoms can be addressed, and so on – what you arrive at is often merely an acknowledgement of the surface grief you feel. There might be something more sinister and sad circulating inside. It’s the loss of a person as they knew themselves. The freedom of being you as you knew yourself. The unpicking of past hurt and pain, of needing sometimes to brush aside interventions and truces. And what can rush to the surface is family tension, often between siblings who, as adults, are linked simply through their parents. This tension is like a rubber band. It has a certain amount of elasticity to it, which can be stretched to a limit but then snap, and the death of one or both parents can be the cause of that snap. If a parent is ill or gone, things can unravel swiftly in families. What is family love and what does it look like?
Some reflections from people seem like meditations on a peaceful acceptance. Others are like outbursts, accusations to lob at the nebulous, all-seeing cosmos.
For one of my interviewees, Julia, the angst is plentiful. At times her anger overflows. But mainly in our discussion Julia taps into a reserve of resentment, which some people find difficult to open up about.
Julia grew up the responsible one, working with her parents in a shop. ‘From the age of eleven to twenty-five years old, I worked seven days a week, helping these people accumulate their wealth. And so now I resent having to do more, because all these financial discussions, and money and wealth and how you divide it, come into play. And I feel resentful because I think, I’ve done my bit. I’ve given to you, I’ve helped you, I’ve worked. And you haven’t acknowledged my efforts.’
Julia would like her brother and sist
er to ‘step up to do this part’. The problem is, they haven’t. ‘And so I’ve got resentment toward my brother and my sister,’ she says.
Julia is in her fifties, the eldest of three siblings. She’s divorced with adult children. She lives with a partner, and is also a grandmother. Her brother, who is close to Julia in age, has assumed financial responsibility for their parents’ assets and the like. Her sister, meanwhile, plays ‘the dynamic of being the youngest in the family’.
‘And so the dynamics are that I’m the oldest, I’m the most responsible, I’m the one to help with the running around.’
It frustrates Julia. She feels she’s subject to the gender bias that afflicts other women like her – she has friends in similar situations. She offers examples: a woman who’s never married quit her job to help care for her high-needs parents, but made the choice to continue living on her own. However, her extended family pressures her to move in with her parents, both of whom require 24/7 care. There is a story of two siblings who asked their eldest sister to quit her job; they would pay her to be a quasi-carer because they run a business full-time. She said no. ‘She’s not comfortable dealing with sickness. She doesn’t want to deal with old people.’
Julia is trying to put in place boundaries, to say, ‘I’m only prepared to do X.’
‘So I’ve got to work out what that X is for me.’ She describes her partner, from Greece, like she is, as a very caring man, who cooks food and takes it to Julia’s mother. ‘He does things that I haven’t seen other men do. It’s nice. But he’s forcing me to do more than I want to.’
She admits that left to her own devices – and she realises it may sound harsh – she would rather walk away from the situation, say, ‘No, I’m not prepared to do anything more for you. I can’t. Because I’ll resent you too much.’
She describes a father who was very focused on himself; generational favouritism towards males in her family. ‘My grandmother loved her sons more than her daughters. I was twenty-one years old when I turned up on my grandmother’s doorstep and she looked at me and said, “Why didn’t they send your brother?”’ Julia was disappointed and hurt; she’d only seen her grandmother a few times in her life.
A deeper source of trouble is in her parents’ attempts to marry her off at seventeen. ‘I resented that so badly. Because I kept on thinking in my head, “I’m not a burden to you.” I got into university and I didn’t even tell them because I knew that they wouldn’t value that.’
But instead of walking away, she is trying to let past hurts go. Not completely forget, but find a way to help her parents without sacrificing her own serenity and lifestyle. She is brokering an inner peace deal in order to be there for parents whom she feels were not there for her. Attempting to dilute the strange power of regret.
Both of her parents have health problems. Her father was recently involved in a major car accident in Greece, where Julia’s parents spend six months every year, a more social and enlivening place for them than Sydney, where they’re relatively socially isolated. And before travelling overseas, they were both involved in minor car accidents. ‘So the decision not to drive, it will be upon us,’ she says.
Her father, in his eighties, doesn’t want to lose his independence. ‘He’s been driving since he was sixteen years old. So to mentally acknowledge that he can’t drive, that’s going to be a big deal for him. And I think he will struggle with it.’
Julia says her father is physically strong but is starting to exhibit possible signs of dementia. Her mother has an ongoing cancer issue, which won’t be fatal for her, but debilitates the family. ‘She’s been battling it for at least the last twenty years.’ It’s a blood cancer that exhibits itself on the skin. ‘But I think the impact of her disease has made her quite tired, and … whenever we bring up the fact that Dad should go and see a doctor about his getting older, she’s very reluctant to do that, because she’s tired of seeing doctors, and tired of constantly doing that doctor dance and routine. I think that that’s the wrong choice, because that’s been detrimental to my dad …’
She doesn’t think fear is the only inhibitor. Rather, her mother assumes this is just how people get old. ‘So, forgetfulness – this is just people getting old. There’s nothing you can do about it. And truly she’s tired. She’s tired of seeing doctors. She goes to the doctor once a week to get her bloods done. She’s tired of the check-up [at the hospital] every quarter. So she doesn’t want to start that with my dad. She’s scared of the unknown, in that she doesn’t want to have to deal with it. So she fobs it off, saying he’s just getting old. He is just getting old, but we could help him just get old. We could potentially slow that down.’
In all of this, Julia’s struggle is to find and maintain some peace. She realises a missing key to serenity is letting go of her resentment and frustration, because her parents won’t always be here. Years of therapy have helped Julia on this path, while being a mother and grandmother herself has also contributed to a gradual shift in tone.
‘It’s easy for me to say, “Oh, my parents weren’t the best and didn’t do the right thing by me.” But I think my parents did whatever they knew. They were the best parents they could be. Now, whether they made mistakes or did things wrong, well, they’re only human. So I’ve had to learn to live with that and accept that …’
‘Do you?’ I ask.
‘Well, I try to. And I’ve got good days and I’ve got bad days.’
Experience isn’t a straight line. This peeling away, it’s painful. Parents getting older forces something upon you. You can no longer carry your grievances in the same way.
‘It’s like, “I have to be the better person, and I don’t want to,”’ I observe lightly.
We both laugh, even though it’s not really that funny.
With my folks
We’re at the hospital again.
‘We’re going to polish him up a bit.’ That’s what Dr A*, my father’s specialist, said a few years ago when Dad was in for a stay.
‘Has he been here before?’ a nurse asks me today.
‘Yes.’ He should get one of those loyalty cards that gets stamped every visit.
Forms to fill out. ‘Where was he born?’ asks another.
‘Palestine.’
He frowns. ‘It doesn’t exist,’ he mutters.
‘We’re going to take a photo of your brain, Mr Mahud …’
It’s Mahmud, I want to say, but don’t because they are only here to help.
The emergency room at St Vincent’s is small. Two vending machines stand to one side, a TV looks down on those waiting. The plastic chairs are uncomfortable.
In the same way an airport can be a third space – neutral, disarming – a hospital waiting room dissolves differences. It can be strangely unifying – within a family and more collectively. It can also break you open and put on display the inner workings of a family in distress. This is the place that invites reconciliation or a fight. Where things are exposed or laid bare. It’s like a checkpoint. Something important and more significant than your everyday issues is taking place here, where nurses and doctors triage patients, plug them in and reassure them, try to solve the challenges they present. It’s a place of life, but the waiting room forces something in those waiting: a reminder of how battles rage daily, how none of us are completely free. It’s not exactly neutral. But it doesn’t have a dog in the fight. It just holds you in a cold space, drained of emotion – practical, real, a buzzkill, in a way. Buy some crisps and watch the football on silent.
Inside the ward, there is more of everything. Opinions, emotions, activity. This is the real world unfiltered. You hear things, sometimes funny. The whir of machines, the low chatter of nurses and doctors.
I’m there every day with Mum. We become familiar with the hospital again, pressing the buttons on the lift for Dad’s floor in an automated way. You get used to this.
Friday
Mum is perched on a chair in Dad’s room as though she’s expecting a
reason to get up at any moment. An arrival or news. We spend a long day with Dad, who is taken in for a procedure in the afternoon. You lose all sense of normal time on days like this, when you’re drifting in and out.
I see a shift during this particular hospital visit in how Dad deals with it. When he was in earlier this year for the catheter procedure, he couldn’t leave fast enough. The day he was to be discharged, he was heavy with frustration – he wanted to go. And when the nurse finally announced that he could leave, Dad whipped off the blanket to reveal he was fully dressed under his robe. The nurse had a chuckle, but she looked quite startled.
‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘You’re in a bit of a hurry.’
I wanted to laugh – Dad acting like a teenager whose parent had just left the room. Dad about to sneak out the window.
During a previous stay, I would wander into Dad’s ward only to find his bed empty. Once, when I questioned a nurse, she broke out into a knowing grin, attempting a scolding tone: ‘Your dad’s a bit cheeky. He just disappears.’
This time there’s no fight in him. It’s not defeat though, either. It’s some form of acceptance. Maybe he needs to stay longer, he even acknowledges at one point.
When they prep Dad for a procedure to check his heart, I wait for them to wheel him off, always beside Mum, and my heart feels heavy. I have never found it easy to see Dad taken away like this. I can help him eat, adjust his bed, make sure he’s comfortable, ease him through a dip in his mood. But when I see him in a bed being led away, my calm almost slips.
I’m not sure what it is about this that lands so hard in me. The day before, his angiogram seemed far more worrisome. This simple procedure requires only a local anesthetic. But the tears threaten to erupt at seeing Dad’s vulnerability. Fresh sadness.
‘The hope of human connectedness’
Emma*, forty-three, jokes early on in our exchange that it’s not age that makes her feel old, it’s some of her life experiences. ‘Especially this year, I’ve definitely felt older.’
