How to Be a Caregiver to Aging, Difficult Parents

The lessons I learned from my aging mother’s prom dress

Alissa Bader Clark as a child with her mother.

I grew up in a house of slammed doors, broken glass, and disagreement. My parents were always arguing. They argued about the long-distance bill. They argued about who was going to make dinner. They argued about who was going to wash the dishes. They argued about who caused the car’s broken transmission and how they were going to pay for it. They argued about the electric bill. They argued about each other’s relatives.

When my parents weren’t arguing, they were at the edge of starting an argument. There was no peace between them. It hadn’t always been that way. When I was about five or six, I remembered my parents hugging each other in the kitchen when my father came home from work. You’re back, my mother would say as she hugged my father, crooning in his ear. She was only a few inches shorter than he was, her mouth at the perfect height for him to hear her hushed words. I missed you. My day was so long. How was yours? I would sit in one of the ugly heavy wooden barstools in the kitchen, swishing back and forth, feeling awkward, because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in that room. But I didn’t know where else I was supposed to be. No matter. As the years went on, those moments of affection between the two of them disappeared.

During the summers my mother would take long trips, which seemed to become even longer as I got older, to visit my grandparents in Connecticut. They were very sick and getting sicker. She would take me up there with her, to their big grey and white Victorian house with this massive screened-in porch, and I would spend the summers becoming increasingly bored out of my mind. There was little there for me to do.

My mother, meanwhile, would try to care for my grandparents, especially my grandmother, who was the sickest of them all. I remember the contrast between the two of them. My mother, round-faced, her dark brown hair always tousled, in her coordinated 1970s polyester blouse and stretch pants. My grandmother, hair cut short and turned iron-gray and white, in her cotton housedress, flesh-colored support stockings, and the white orthopedic shoes she always wore. When they were together, they were always standing next to each other, the daughter supporting the mother—or rather, the mother giving the daughter something to support.

I wondered why she made herself available in that house in the first place. She had a whole home of her own. My grandparents already had someone to take care of them—my mother’s older brother, my Uncle B, who still lived on the top floor of that house and slept in the same bed he had when he was a child. My father was absent from these visits. “He had to work,” my mother would always say, and left it at that.

***

It’s the summer between seventh and eighth grade, and I’m back in Connecticut. This time, my mother is helping Uncle B pack up the house. My grandparents are now both gone and my Uncle B decides to move to Maryland to be closer to my mother.

My uncle has already hired an estate company to go through the house. The kitchen and living room are set up like a store. Every closet is emptied, their contents all arranged on folding tables. There are already price tags on most of the items in the house. But they have forgotten to empty my mother’s bedroom closet. My mother and I are sorting through it.

I see something turquoise blue and shiny. “Mom, is this your prom dress?”

“Yes!” She pulls it out of the closet and holds it up. The material is brighter as she holds it in the sunlight. It is a 1950s-style dress with a fitted bodice and full skirt. As she holds it against her body, I see the disappointment on her face. The dress is meant for someone much thinner. She smiles again. “It’s made of Chromespun. That’s a special fabric they used back then. Your grandmother’s dressmaker made it just for me.”

I’ve never owned a dress like that. It looks like the same kind of dress that the tiny, wind-up ballerina wore in the jewelry box I’d owned since I was six. “It’s pretty. Can I have it?”

“Of course.”

We dig through some more. The closet is cedar-lined and packed with stuff. I look behind me and notice that her room is the largest bedroom in the house. I’d never noticed this before all the furniture and knick-knacks were packed away.

I see a yellowing garment bag and unzip it. A formal white dress. A wedding dress. On the other end of the closet, there’s another garment bag with another wedding dress.

I’m confused. Two wedding dresses? In my parents’ wedding photos, I only see one. I look at my mother.

She pauses. “I guess you’re old enough to hear the story. I was engaged to this other man, and we had the wedding all set up. But then I called it off. His mother had called in a private investigator to investigate your grandfather. I found out right before the wedding. Why she did that, I don’t know. Probably something to do with money.”

According to my mother, my grandfather was the wealthiest man in the world. When I was growing up, I never saw any reason to not believe her.

I finger an embroidered flower on a sleeve. The dress is made of heavy white satin with a scratchy lace overlay. It is very out of style for the 1980s. I will probably never wear it, I decide.

“She was too much into our wedding anyway,” my mother continues. “She insisted that we have a special song we would play for our first dance. What a trashy woman.”

“But you married Daddy after that, and it turned out all right?” I ask hopefully.

My mother is quiet. Finally, she says, “You can take this dress, and not the other one. The other one, I don’t care what happens to it.” She hands me the garment bag with the dress she wore at her and my father’s wedding.

A few years later, I sneak the wedding dress into my high school drama department’s costume closet, where it eventually disappears. The prom dress I hold onto until I mistakenly wash it in one of my college dorm’s washing machines. It comes out tattered and gray. I threw it into the trash.

***

It’s almost thirty years later. My mother collapses at home and the ambulance brings her to the hospital, the one nearest to her house, in the town she always thought she was too good for. The hospital admits her to the intensive care unit. For the next few days, she’s only barely conscious. Eventually, she can mumble a few words, but none make any sense. You can tell that something has snapped, that something is not quite right with her.

My mother’s younger brother, my Uncle M, and I communicate on what needs to be done next. We’re not sure if she can return to the house by herself. We hire a lawyer. In the process of working my mother’s case, the lawyer asks that all mail from my mother be forwarded to his law office. This is where we find out all the other problems. These are the once-hidden problems that now require uncomfortable conversation to sift through to resolve.

***

My mother shows signs of improvement about two weeks after being admitted to the hospital. The attending nurse tells me she can now sit up, walk those few steps to the bathroom, feed herself. Best yet, she can now speak coherently. She can now string together complex sentences instead of disjointed words.

The hospital transfers her from intensive care into a semi-private room.. I decide it’s time to speak to her on the phone and I find myself in the curious position of wishing she was well and needing to tell her the bad news. It occurs to me I’m now in my late thirties and have never had to tell my mother anything truly difficult before.

“Mom,” I say softly. “I’m looking through these papers the lawyer sent to me. I’m seeing paperwork for the bank for another mortgage?”

“I have to have a shunt put in my head,” my mother replies. “Operation, next week. They say it’s the only thing that will help.”

“It’s a big mortgage, Mom. It’s almost eighty thousand dollars. And these credit card bills...ten thousand dollars to Nordstrom?”

“They’re treating me like a queen here, Alissa. A queen! They come by and give me my lunch and say hi to me.”

“I thought the house was paid off after Daddy died. I thought that’s why you retired early.

I didn’t know it was that bad.”

“I’ll need that shunt for the rest of my life, they say. But maybe I can recover, thank goodness. They may have caught it just in time.”

***

The worst part of being a child of difficult parents is when you get to the end. When you’re a child or teenager, you can dream of escape. You can make up elaborate fantasies about one day getting the hell out of that house or that town and making something different of yourself.

You can go far away to where no one knows you. You can be different. You can be independent.

You can make your own life. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can do exactly that. Grow as an adult. Become your own person. But when those parents get old, their world is already becoming smaller. Then you need to decide if it’s worth it to become a part of it again.

***

My mother gives me power of attorney. My uncle and I decide the best course of action is to sell the house and set her up in a small senior living apartment. I decide to fly out from Colorado to Maryland to break the news to her in person.

“It can go,” she said, from her hospital bed. “That’s fine.”

That afternoon I go over to the lawyer’s office to sign the contract to sell the house on behalf of my mother. The paralegal hands me page after page of the legal document, some pages marked with a sticky note saying, “Sign here.” I sign her signature. I feel numb, like I’m on autopilot, signing away my childhood home.

After I sign all the pages, the paralegal stacks them into a neat pile and slides them into a file folder. Then the realization comes to me.

She never liked that house, I think. She hated it all.

And I wonder if she hated all of the things that came with it too.

Alissa Bader Clark (she/her) is a former bookseller and publishing professional who later built a career in technology. She has attended fiction and non-fiction workshops at Hunter College CUNY, NYC’s 92nd Street Y, Catapult, Tin House, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Regis University in Denver, Colorado. She lives south of Denver with her family. You can find her on Substack at alissabader.substack.com.