Parenting Your Parent - Part 1

I will start this blog entry by stating that I am a very lucky woman because I have two wonderful, living, loving parents, who are still together and who must have raised me well. Now that I'm a mother do I finally realize all of the selfless sacrifice parents do for the unconditional love of their children (most of them). If we are lucky, they raise us with good values and an open mind, not to mention with open hearts. Mine certainly did that.

When I was ten years old, my father decided that we would be leaving our home in Argentina to live in the United States, regardless of whether my mom or us really wanted to. Not that my dad was a selfish man, but he knew a good opportunity when he saw one. I will not go through all of the acculturation challenges of moving to a land where you may only know one person, cannot speak the language, have no job, and know nothing about the culture, just some vague idea that your value system completely clashes with the new one and that while you embrace it, you only do so very reluctantly, fighting it all the way. Constantly comparing everything, finding that nothing measures up. It's a pretty lonely place. That is where my parents found themselves, but mostly my mother was the one who suffered. My father went to work immediately, and while busy learning a new trade as a baker and excellent cake decorator who arose every morning at 2 a.m. and went to bed at 9 p.m., did not leave him any time for feeling emotions of any type, other than exhaustion. Thank you daddy for working so hard.

Back to my mother. My mother gave up a passionate, prominent career as a neo-natal surgical nurse at a hospital, where saving babies and assisting in deliveries was the only place she wanted to be. Being very happy there and very close to her family, she didn't want to come here, but did so at the insistence of my father. So what do you do when you can't stay home, need money, and don't know the language in a foreign land? You go clean houses, nice fancy ones that you know you will never live in. In short, this was the first contributing factor to killing her spirit. We moved from NJ to Florida a year later in hopes of warmer weather and friendlier people than those in the north east. Not to say that they are unfriendly, but to a Hispanic culture, at the risk of sounding offensive, they are as cold as the snow they live in. But going back home was not an option, so we plugged on.

Between preparing meals, keeping our home clean, dealing with the loss of her family, and working, my mother never took the time to learn English. She got comfortable in her pain and the only source of happiness came in the form of letters from back home, or tape recordings her family recorded once a month, sent by mail. In not learning English, my mom made no American friends, hardly any Hispanic ones. She was sad, lonely, and very tired. Within a couple of years, my sister and I were fluent in both languages, and often used it against my parents like all bilingual children do.

So here is where my parenting my parents started. I remember the first time. I was 10. I had already been translating everything for my parents, especially my mom. Every time we went to a store or anywhere she needed a question answered, I asked it. Then my parents were fortunate and bought our first home here. I translated all of the bank paperwork, both for them and for the bank, who had no translators. Did I state that I was 10? Very quickly, I was translating and explaining the concept of credit cards to my parents, who didn't have those options back home, soon I was translating and talking to bill collectors, I guess I hadn't explained the concept of credit to my parents very well. I was translating when my teachers told my parents I wasn't doing well enough in class, all the mail that came to the house, all the things my mother had to write, translating at the purchase of a new car, etc.

Fast forward 25 years....September, 2000. My mother was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma. A cancer of the plasma cell within the bone marrow, rare. After seeing different doctors who offered multiple protocol options and very little hope, being the controlling person I am, and loving my mommy, mami as I call her, I had to take matters into my own hands. I called around, I learned to do research on my own with the wonderful help of the Internet, and trained myself at medical research by reading medical journals and interpreting the medical language, especially in the form of oncology. I had to save my mami, no one else was going to love her like I did. That is when parenting my mom went to a different level. I loved researching so much I changed careers, went back to school and got my masters in Library & Information Science, and kept researching. Clinical trials, medications, alternative medicine, you name it. I translated everything at every appointment she had. I went in with my legal pad with 2 pages of questions, doctors hated me, I treated them like they worked for me, imagine that, they being resentful to that, my saving my mami. I made all the calls to the insurance companies to pay for all of these expensive ($7,000 a month medications), pharmaceutical companies to see if they would sponsor the medications. I learned to interpret all of the blood levels in all of the tests and questioned when I thought the treatments weren't working. I researched what the top doctors treating Myeloma were doing. I even asked the doctors to switch medications when I knew others had come to market recently, before they gave us the option. Did I say that they hated me?

Unfortunately, this taught my mom that someone was responsible for her, that someone would always fight for her and take care of her. She no longer had to do it herself. Unfortunately, I was also her daughter, and I needed my mami. So we traded. She became my child who had this life depending project, and I became her savior, in exchange for keeping her alive to love me. Being Hispanic, this would not be anything strange. In fact, it's common. We don't put our parents in a home when they are old and can't care for themselves. We simply move them in with us. But being partly of this culture, I know there are other options to the way I was raised. Even if these ways go against what I believe it, yet I can't ignore them. But did I say that my mom is only 59? She is not old, she has just grown helpless and I've enabled her to lean on me far too much far too long.

So now I'm a mom to my sweet little 3 year old son, Liam. I have my own family, my own problems, my own dreams, my own responsibilities. And I still have my mom depending on me. And I am so conflicted on so many levels I can't write them down fast enough without thinking there must be some I forgot.....See Parenting Your Parent - Part 2.