Two things happened this week: my elder daughter came home to live with us again and my mother had a fall and broke two fingers in her left hand.

It made me realise that my role with both has changed.

When you are a child, your parents look after you. When you are an adult, they help you out. When you are old, they look after you. At least, that’s the way it should be.

My mother is 87 and she still wants to look after me. When I was ill, she made me soup, because that was all I could eat. What she didn’t tell me was that her carer made the soup under her supervision because she couldn’t stand for long enough to prepare the vegetables. Now she has had her fall, she finally realises that it’s time for her children to look after her.

My daughter starts work for a large accountancy firm on 5th September and needs to set up a home office as she will be working from home two or three times a week. Our front room is ideally suited to this, as it is already used as a study by all of us. The issue is that it hasn’t been properly cleaned for a while and, as she has allergies, she needs to be in a clean environment. I realise we have moved into the middle role, as it is she who will be organising the cleaning and leading the project, while I help.

It's a strange situation to be in. In reality, my mother has been gradually leaning on us, her children – I have a brother and sister – more and more over the past few years, but she hasn’t wanted to admit it. Until she had this fall, she also hasn’t wanted to admit that the man who has taken her under his wing is really her carer, because she has thought that she was caring for him. Only now might she agree to having a fall monitor; she has kept arguing that she didn’t need one because she wasn’t likely to fall.

It's easier for me to accept the change in roles for my mother because it has been gradual. With my daughter, it seems very sudden. Yesterday she was a university student, and we could still see her as a child. She has gone travelling for two months and now she has returned with a new confidence, and we must finally accept that she really is a fully grown adult, and that she is only living with us because she happens, by coincidence, to be working in Cambridge. It makes sense for her to live at home and save all her money – which she will do, because she is a sensible young woman (I nearly said “child” there) and the sort of person who has spreadsheets for everything. You can see that she is ideally suited to accountancy!

This change feels odd, even a little uncomfortable, but it is inevitable, and we must embrace it, just as we must embrace looking after my mother and treasure her while she is still with us.

Mary

A Moodscope member