adult children of aging parents

"In March 2020, Martha McPhee, her husband, and their two almost-grown children set out for her childhood home in New Jersey, where she finds herself grappling simultaneously with a mother slipping into severe dementia and a house that's been neglected of late. As Martha works to manage her mother's care and the sprawling, ramshackle property . . . she is pulled back into her childhood, almost against her will. Martha grew up at Omega Farm with her four sisters, five stepsiblings, mother, and stepfather, in a house filled with art, people, and the kind of chaos that was sometimes benevolent, sometimes more sinister. Caring for her mother and her children, struggling to mend the forest, the past relentlessly asserts itself--even as Martha's mother, the person she might share her memories with or even try to hold to account, no longer knows who Martha is"--Provided by publisher.

"Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a . . . portrait of her complicated parents--her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father--and of the . . . moments that accompany a child's transition to caregiver"--Amazon.

"When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? Astrid's youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid's thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most"--Provided by publisher.

"When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself--an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook--in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure--the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay. As these two unforgettable characters try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty's life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town--crumbling but still colorful--to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair"--Provided by publisher.

When George Hodgman left Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he found himself (an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook) in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Can George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure--the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay. As they try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty's life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town life to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair where he once worked.

Explores the challenges children face when they must care for their aging parents and offers practical advice on how to best cope with the changing dynamic of the parent-child relationship.

In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through a mixture of cartoons, family photos, documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"--with predictable results--the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies--an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades--the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.

Siblings Sydney, Gina, and Rick struggle to overcome the obstacles that have shattered their lives as they come together to care for their mother who suffered a debilitating stroke.

Seventeen-year-old Molly, her mother in a hospice and her father having deserted the family years earlier, is forced to go live with her older sister Amanda, and even though the two girls have always had an explosive relationship and have never been close, they must find a way to overcome their differences and learn to support one another.

Steve Luxenberg shares the shocking secrets he uncovered about his mother's past after learning that she was not an only child, as she had always claimed, but instead had a mentally handicapped sister who was sent to an institution when the girls were in their twenties and discusses how his discoveries impacted his relationship with his mother.