Our turn to give the needed care

Thoughts on 124 days of quarantine. 

“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”  -Eleanor Roosevelt

I call my mother every day. We listen to books and discuss them. Daniel also calls his mother regularly. My sister Liz and her husband are watching over his aging parents, Rosi and John. We are all so grateful and truly blessed to have them. 

We grow up looking at our parents as the strongest people in our world. They handle everything, they take care of everything, and they can do everything. Then you grow up and as you grow older, unfortunately so do they. Then one day you wake up and realize that your parents can no longer handle and take care of everything, and they are no longer to do everything. When that day comes, it is a hard realization and it feels incredibly unsettling. 

You start to realize that it is you that is to have to be ready to handle things for them and take care of them. You realize that you are now going to have to be the strong one and that thought is incredibly intimidating. In your head, you still think of yourself as the child and they are your parents, and deep down you want them to be strong because their being strong makes you feel safe and secure. But they can’t be strong anymore, and now they need you to be the strong one. They need you to be the one to make them feel safe and secure as they finish out the rest of their lives.

I remember my ex mother-in-law, who was an amazing woman and in perfect health, or so we thought but one day she was gone. Her illness caught everybody off guard and in a matter of days, relatives were planning her funeral. When we found out my brother in law and sister got COVID-19 Daniel and I were worried since they are the very people who are caring for my mother. When we found out she was negative, it was an emotional moment for all of us. We were relieved and what a tender mercy! 

I knew in that moment that our lives from now on with the outbreak of the pandemic will never be the same. We can no longer look at our parents as “the strong ones”. We both knew that from this point forward it is the two of us that need to be “the strong ones” for both our mothers. It made us both sad because we long for that time when we got to be the little kids who always had their parents to take care of everything. But we also knew that the best way we could show our parents how much we love and appreciate everything they have done and sacrificed for us over so many years was to give them the comfort of knowing that we will be strong for them and they needn’t worry about anything. And so that is what we intend to do. It is our turn to care for them and it is our honor and privilege to do so.

Con amor, 

Vero