Month: September 2018

If you haven’t read part I of this series, please read that here.

My mom and I pulled up to the hotel valet entrance and the experience of just getting from the car to the hotel room we’d share for the next couple days was as challenging a process as I’d experienced getting her ready to leave her care facility.  There is just so much stuff.  To be clear, nothing I write is a complaint. Even the things that sound like complaints aren’t really.  This woman rushed me to the hospital when I fell out of a tree and needed 20 stitches as a 3 year old.  She moved me to a school with more diversity and educational opportunity when I was 7 even though she really didn’t understand the full magnitude of either of those things. She was there at every turn to teach me, to scold me, and most importantly to me as a kid who watched foster brothers and sisters come and go sometimes weekly, she was there to love me.  So when I share the events of this weekend, even the hard ones, they really aren’t complaints in the normal sense. Read More

This is part I of a three-part series about senior support and caring for a parent

I pulled up to the adult care home where my 85-year old mom lives to take her out for the weekend and spend some time together. We don’t live in the same state for a variety of reasons that center mostly around California’s abhorrent lack of support for low-income seniors and the people who care for them. But I decided to put these political conversations away for a weekend as I walked into her building, turned the corner down the hall to her room, and opened her door…and what I saw was a punch in the gut that started a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows.   Read More