Full list: Is there a primary stroke center near you? – USATODAY.com

Full list: Is there a primary stroke center near you? – USATODAY.com.

I hadn’t heard of Stroke Care Units until very recently. The data on recovery, reducing long term disability and reduced recurrence of stroke is significant for people who receive care from an SCU rather than an ICU/CCU or medical/surgical floor. The exact mechanism is not clearly identified, but whatever the reason, the outcomes are better and the stays tend to be shorter.

Is there the Stroke Care Unit near you???

Moving from “Burden” to “Participant”, a paradigm shift in the roles the 1st generation can play in the extended family.

I hear this at least once a week – someone will state they don’t want to be a burden on their family. They don’t want to live with adult children, they don’t want to ask for help if they live alone. It hurts my heart to hear this, I learn so much from the Elders I know and enjoy sharing time and stories. I don’t want to see my role in my family change from participant — from being essential to our joyous and goal-oriented function — to feeling that I have nothing of value to contribute and would only be a draw on resources. A “burden”.

 

New American Dictionary defines burden thus:
burden |ˈbərdn|noun
1 a load, esp. a heavy one.
• a duty or misfortune that causes hardship, anxiety, or grief; a nuisance
• the main responsibility for achieving a specified aim or task
• a ship’s carrying capacity; tonnage:

2 (the burden) the main theme or gist of a speech, book, or argument
• the refrain or chorus of a song. (italics mine)

How did we come to believe that as we age in our family, our role evolves from essential service to a “misfortune that causes hardship, anxiety, grief”, or that we become a “nuisance”??? I have fixed ideas about how this shift from essential, valued, integrated member of the family disintegrated in our Post WWII culture, (you can find them addressed in Chapter One of “Holding Hands: Journeys with the Aging Family” to be released in 2013). More important here is refuting the myth of the invisible, devalued, aging adult and moving from “burden” to “participant” in the co-generational family.
The “burden” concept begs the question, “What do we need to change so that Elders stop defining themselves and their needs as a burden?”  How do we help them quantify the value they bring to the family?
It would be nice if Elders in a co-generational setting were more visible in our media. Portrayals in popular culture “cameo” grandparents, aunts and uncles. They are not part of the weekly story line, and are often written out of our own storylines as well.
This invisibility comes from both sides. Our aging parents, who began their families in the neo-television/post WWII era, also have no model for integrating parents. Likely, they moved away from their own families of origin to the suburbs after the war, leaving their own parents to the care of each other, their siblings or a child who stayed geographically close. To have parents live with us after WWII was interpreted as a weakness – not cutting “apron strings” or being overly involved. “You aren’t going to let your parents tell you what to do, are you?” as though taking advice from those who have been there/done that, would be shameful. Not independent. Not trendy.

Our very narrow tolerance of anything “different” bled into the way we learned to not care for our Elders. On the other end of the parenting spectrum, we were expected to cut our children loose at the earliest legal age and start planning our midlife, renewed “independent, Golden Years” with a sense of relief that all that family stuff was done, checked off the to-do list of life. I’m here to tell you, that was all a bunch of hooey.
What we gained instead were expensive and low-quality institutions to house Elders, middle-aged parents suffering from “empty nest syndrome”, new retirees suffering from a lack of purpose and sense of value. I stand firmly behind the belief, from four decades of observation and one of professional exposure, that humans are most decidedly NOT meant to be independent, autonomous islands in the stream. We hunger for connectedness, integration, participation, feeling valued and loved, and contributing to family and community. The tribal model of survival is as ancient as our earliest recorded histories, there is a reason why. This experiment of division has not promoted individual or family health as our members have aged.  It fractured family resources rather than concentrating family wealth and resources of time, and now creates a discontent in the Elder generation which too often leads to great feelings of sadness and loss. Where they may desire connection and support, they deny their own needs because somewhere along the line they bought the lie that to do so would be burdensome to the very people they gave life and love to.
This is wrong.

Recognizing how we got here is part of the solution. The other part is asking yourself how you show  you recognize the contribution your parents, aunts and uncles, Elder family friends make in your life now. Reminiscing is great, but subtly reinforces the concept that those days of value have passed.

  • Why is their presence important NOW?
  • How do they add value to your life NOW?
  • What could you not do without them for NOW?

In the early self help years, we called these “ego strokes” and they developed a reputation for being unhealthy. They aren’t. We all need to know that we matter to the people around us, and no age cohort needs that more than the one that has been rendered invisible, comical, burdensome in 40 years of televised cultural teaching.
What can your parents teach your children – essential family or cultural knowledge, survival skills, games and playfulness – that you can’t due to limited resources or time? Looking at the generations that stand on either side of you, what do they have to offer each other? Child care? Cooking lessons? Learning to budget money? Homework supervision? Being the licensed driver while a teen gets their supervised hours in? Living models of history?  Can your child learn how to express love and service to an Elder family member, just because it’s the right thing to do? (Teach them now with your parents, and they will teach your grandchildren in time).
This is how we rebuild a cultural model of family members taking care of each other across the lifespan. This model is seamless, no one gets left out. Everyone knows they are important to the quality of someone else’s life, to the security of the family and it’s members, and love and respect have ample room to grow.
Referring back to that original definition, the alternate to “nuisance” was:
2 (the burden) the main theme or gist of a speech, book, or argument
• the refrain or chorus of a song.

I choose to think this is where the descriptor as Elder family member being “a burden” first came from. As the historians of our family and culture, that is a much more tender and fitting definition of those who have come before us, shaped us, nurtured us, raised us up. May our Elder Generation come again to be revered as carrying the chorus of our family song.

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Happy Father’s Day,
Katherine

The Art of Parent Care: Help me know what you need.

Thank you for filling out my poll.  I hope to use this information to guide me in my blogging, so I am addressing the issues most pressing to my readers.  Remember, we’re all in this together!

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The Art of Parent Care: Help me know what you need.

Thank you for filling out my poll.  I hope to use this information to guide me in my blogging, so I am addressing the issues most pressing to my readers.  Remember, we’re all in this together!

[polldaddy poll=6801129]

Plan for some self care in 2013!

I am sitting this holiday morning in the house that I grew my children in.  Here we raised lambs and goats and chickens and colts and a couple steers; where any given Saturday or Sunday morning could find unexpected teenaged bodies flopped sound asleep across my living room, arms and legs dangling over the edge of the sofa or arms of chairs as though some explosion had thrown them there.

A lot of memories were made in this house. It was a place of activity, growth and creativity, laughter and teenaged angst.  Felt tip marker identifies where pictures were colored; a bent heater vent displays someone’s foot expressing impulsive anger.  Here is the wall I papered while my then husband took our children away for two weeks (that was what I thought a vacation was in those years – everyone gone from home except me).

My mother spent a lot of time at my house.  Often, it was spent cleaning up after us, as I was not a stay-at-home mom, I was a doing-everything-but! Mom.  Besides working full time, we had 4H, FFA and Equestrian Team and later High School Rodeo, which took us out on the road 10 weeks a year.  I was a “lets tidy the barn” mom, while the living room could rock on it’s own with co-mingled clean and dirty laundry, dogs, books and toys laying about, waiting for the Saturday morning fit of cleaning.

Less clutter of both stuff and time makes everything simpler, and in simplicity, planning is easier.  I know I brought some of my own issues to the organized chaos that was our lives – afraid to say “no” to work or activities, trying to prove I was worthy of love, trying to prove as an educated, middle income woman, I could do and have it all.  (Not!)

As a family we rarely planned our activities to include my mother – in part because she didn’t want us to arrange our lives to meet her needs – but that was exactly how life was arranged.  Without intention it was often chaotic, haphazard and crisis-oriented.  Planning things together would have enabled us to utilize her energy and outside resources better so our time together wasn’t just spent doing errands. We could have done more of what I’m remembering this morning: Skip Bo and Scrabble at this dining table, 8 years of Christmas mornings in this living room, her grandchildren in jammies tucked under her arm as presents were doled out; Sunday dinners that brought everyone together.

We had love, we had animals, we had stuff, we had fun.  We had each other.  What we lacked was a plan – a vision for serenity in the midst of the jumble of activities and overlapping needs of three generations.  A plan for abrupt change in needs.  A plan for my spouse and I to get some rest and respite from juggling all that we did.

As a New Year shines on the horizon, I pose this challenge to you:  in the midst of organizing around your family needs, make a plan for self care so that you can more ably care for those you love, more intentionally spend loving time (not just busy-ness) with them. Time misspent is time lost to us…

I will post more on planning schemes and those things that should be considered in the multi-generational family during the coming weeks.  Let’s make 2013 the year that brings organized harmony, identification of family resources and confidence to your maturing family!

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Holiday Jolly, 2007

Love to you and Blessed Family-ing!

Katherine