Mothering Mother
Aug 13, 2007
Carol O'Dell
Mothering Mother
Kunati Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-60164-003-1
http:\\www.mothering-mother.com
Carol O’Dell, a Georgian who relocated to Florida, has written a very heartfelt and “to the bone” story about the time she spent being part of the Sandwich Generation. Carol was adopted at 4 years old by a couple in their 50s. She was loved and cherished, but I took from the reading that she always lived a bit on edge with her Mother, who could be quite caustic and cutting with her remarks.
This is the story of her mother’s failing health after her father has died, and Carol’s decision to bring her mother into her home to live with her husband, three teen-age girls, and herself. A story of joining and welcoming someone into the home who is hard to deal with already. Someone who is bitter about the loss of dignity and self-reliance. (Then again, wouldn’t we all be in that situation.)
Carol is a true Southern Woman, who has the Southern Rules of Etiquette deeply steeped within her, and finds herself dealing with a mother who is slowly forgetting social boundaries and ways of interaction, bringing a nearly constant state of embarrassment upon her daughter while in public.
She finds herself tending to a mother who makes jabbing, joking comments as to the fact that the daughter was adopted to care for the mother in her later years. After hearing it enough times, you can’t help but start to wonder.
The feelings of care and love of your parent, combined with despair at watching your life disappear into role of caregiver and housemaid, interspersed with deep guilt over the selfishness you think you must surely have to imagine life without this situation – Carol deals with all of this in her story.
The guilt over contemplation of putting your mother into a home. Fantasizing about it even.
Then the freedom you feel once your mother has passed away, combined by crushing guilt at feeling this way, while at the same time longing to have her there to talk to one more time.
I want to point out here – this is not a dark, dank, depressing book. While it’s serious in nature, Carol has enough dry humor entwined into the story to get a good chuckle out of you at least once a chapter. You have to have humor in real life to survive with your sense of self intact in these situations. Carol does a good job of keeping her humor and her sanity.
This story hit hard with me as I found myself in the same situation as Carol a few years ago and I could relate to every moment. She put on paper so many of my thoughts and feelings that it was scary.
A well written book about life as it is.
Labels: Surviving the Sandwich Generation
