Steph Auteri

It’s a sundrenched Sunday afternoon and my mother is explaining how she wants things to go when she dies. 

“Here’s my last will and testament,” she says, flipping through the thick red binder that contains her living will and other estate planning documents. “I’ve divided the estate equally between you and your brother and have named you executor of the will.” 

She turns to the next section. “Here’s the living will. I’ve put you down as my health care proxy.” 

She turns the page again. Shows me documents on power of attorney and funeral plans. Tells me about the urns she already purchased, along with corresponding cemetery plots. Finally, she pulls a file bin out of the closet. “Here’s where you can find all the information with my passwords, my bank accounts, my life insurance policies… I’m still filling everything out but, by the time you need this, it will all be here.”

“Lovely,” I say, trying to appear casual, as if I contemplate the logistics of my mother’s eventual demise every day.

She pushes the bin back into the closet with a grunt, slides the door closed, and sits on the edge of the bed, palms resting on her thighs.

“Good,” she says and looks up at me. “I can croak now.” 

***

I hadn’t come to my parents’ house to discuss arrangements for end-of-life care. I’d driven over so that Emily—my 8-year-old—could spend time with her 73-year-old grandparents while I surreptitiously gauged how they were doing. 

The fact that my parents indulged Emily’s every whim was a bonus. While they built towers with cardboard blocks, played “restaurant,” or ran through several rounds of Candy Land, I could sink into an easy chair and stare into space. My body—perpetually in motion, unable to keep up with my child’s boundless energy—could finally be at rest. The small things my parents asked me to troubleshoot, like cell phone issues, online shopping and, apparently, living wills, were a small price to pay.

Now, having taken care of serious matters in the privacy of an upstairs bedroom, my mother and I stand at the top of the steps, preparing to head back downstairs where Emily is tormenting my father. My child shrieks with laughter, trying to snatch his baseball cap from his head. My father is barely able to fend her off.

“Poor Da,” I say with a sigh. Emily’s energy levels are always at 120 percent, no matter the time of day. It’s exhausting.

My mom shakes her head with amusement and starts down the stairs. “Let’s go rescue your father,” she says.

This moment—walking toward my irrepressible child and my aging father, having just discussed my parents’ eventual deaths—feels surreal. I am 42. Married. A mother. I have a four-bedroom house in the suburbs. A career. 

Yet there’s never been a moment in which I’ve felt completely sure of myself. I’m still figuring it out. I still need my mom.

At the same time, my parents have reached an age where, more and more, they need me. 

Four years ago, my father retired. The following year, he was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a diagnosis that was eventually upgraded to Alzheimer’s as he began asking the same questions over and over, as he began forgetting small details, like what his favorite takeout dishes were and where they kept the scissors, as he began forgetting—from moment to moment—what it was he had been doing. 

My mother, meanwhile—after surviving a car accident that totaled her car and left her with back and shoulder pain that persists several years later—was also forced into retirement, her nursing career abruptly halted. These days, my mother requires only the occasional bit of help. Mostly, she just needs me to be there sometimes, to help her stave off the boredom that comes from feeling trapped in her home with a man who is forgetting more and more of himself. 

Eventually, I hope she’ll allow me to help in other ways. Drive them to doctor’s appointments. Share the meals I’ve cooked. But my mother is resistant to help. Won’t even ask for it. As far as she’s concerned, it’s still her job to take care of me.

Back in the living room, I sink into my favorite easy chair as Emily dances around my father, giggling and squealing.

“Come on, Em,” says my mom. “You wanna play baseball in the backyard?” 

I roll my eyes. My mother should not be running imaginary bases outside. But just try and stop her.

“YAAAY!” shouts Em at top volume, abandoning her assault on my poor father, allowing him to finally relax into his own easy chair.

“Better you than me,” I mutter. My mom shakes her head.

The two of them tumble out the back door, letting it slam shut behind them and, soon after, we hear the crack of the whiffle ball against the plastic bat. My dad flips open a book and I pull an embroidery project out of my bag. We sit in comfortable silence, him running a finger across the lines in his book, me squinting down at my embroidery. It is a reprieve I need. One I rarely get at home.

Later, Em huffs back inside, cheeks flushed, smelling of sweat and sunblock. I tell her to gather her things. Before we leave, my mother gives me food to take home. The cream cheese she doesn’t think she’ll use. Chopped watermelon. Leftover eggplant rollatini. Hours later, she forwards me a coupon for Bath & Body Works, mostly because I insisted on paying for a new jacket the other day instead of letting her treat me and, for her, this has created a massive imbalance in the universe.

My mother knows that, eventually, she’ll have to lean on me. A little bit at first. And then more.

But for now, here she is, still taking care of me. Still taking care of all of us.

***

My mother was a nurse and the need to provide care was in her bones. She has always mothered everyone around her. 

When my cousins attended the military academy at West Point, we drove the hour up there on Family Weekends, loaded down with care packages and coolers filled with picnic supplies to spend the day with them. 

When an older woman down the street, with no family left nearby, began to weaken and fade, my mother visited her regularly with cookies and coffee, kept her company, drove her to church. 

When her own father got to the point where his living alone felt like a liability, my mother visited him every single day, laundering his clothes, clipping his nails, administering eye drops, and preparing his meals. Her sisters were across the country, so she did it all alone. I watched it break her. 

Now, I see her sliding into that same caretaker role for my father, and it makes me uneasy. As a journalist, I’ve done reporting on end-of-life care, compassion fatigue, and the lack of systemic support that exists for unpaid family caregivers. I pursued these stories because of what I observed while growing up. The weight my mother carried alone, the outsized expectations she carried for herself, made a huge impression on me. I’ve spent a lifetime knowing that, someday, I will fill that role for her. I’ve long wondered whether I’ll be up to the task, whether I’ll ever be able to live up to the person she continues to be.

Over the past year, my father’s condition has worsened. For years, he’s suffered from essential tremors, which have only become more severe. His embarrassment over his tremors has led him to isolate himself, avoiding dinner invitations, dodging vacation plans, the types of things my mother had hoped to do more of during her retirement. 

And now he is forgetting things, too. Who was just on the phone. Whether or not he had lunch. Just the other day, I called my parents on the phone and he had forgotten my mother was in the shower, thought perhaps she was out at the gym. I assured him I would call back later. My mother tells me that when she corrects his memory, he snaps at her, annoyed. I can’t blame him for being frustrated and humiliated and angry at everything he is losing. But I also feel helpless to fix the situation my mother finds herself in. 

All that preparation—the books, the interviews I conducted with medical experts—and I still don’t know what to do. I can’t help but feel it’s because I’m less than my mother. Less astute. Less resourceful. Less capable. 

Meanwhile, my mother continues to carry us, just as she always has. When I ask how I can help, offering to drive my father to his medical appointments or handle the grocery shopping, she’s dismissive.

“You’re a mother,” she says. “You have Emily to take care of.”

As if she hadn’t done the same thing herself as a mother of two. 

As if she hadn’t done more.

***

I am haunted by the small missteps I’ve made as a mother. The snacks I’ve forgotten to pack. The appointments I’ve forgotten to make. The times I’ve run out of patience and snapped at Em. I often think of how my mom would have handled things better.

I think about how I volunteered at Em’s school just once, when she was still in kindergarten. I spent a single morning in the school library, reshelving books while the librarian read aloud to my daughter’s class. Each time I reached the end of another row of shelves, I saw my child looking for me, her face lighting up when our eyes met, and I’d give a little wave. I liked seeing her in her natural environment, but I also couldn’t help thinking about the work I wasn’t getting done while I was there.

“My child gets enough of me at home,” I later joked to my mom friends, and I never volunteered again. 

Later that year, on Mother’s Day, Em gave me a worksheet on which she’d written all her favorite things about me. 

One of her favorite memories?

“The time mommy visitid me at the librery.”

I am not my mother. My own mom was active with the PTA, organized fundraisers for my various extracurriculars, chaperoned dances, and helped me make some truly amazing dioramas, all of it done around her part-time nursing job and the unpaid caregiving work she did for my grandparents. At times, I felt her presence verged on too much (no middle schooler wants their mom getting chummy with their crush at the school dance). But no one could question her devotion to her children. It was an unspoken truth that she would do anything for us. We wouldn’t even have to ask.

The relationship I have with my daughter is different. I’m not active at her school. I don’t volunteer at the Holiday Fair or at Bingo Night. I don’t insert myself into her Girl Scout meetings or linger at the birthday parties she’s been invited to. I view these times when she is not at home as sacred space in which I am finally able to reconnect with myself as someone who is more than just a mother. I sometimes wonder if this makes me selfish. When had my own mother ever put herself first?

I’m also very aware of my more explicit shortcomings. My blood runs cold at the thought that I might someday have to help Em build a diorama. I’m useless at events that require the slightest bit of athleticism or coordination. When I brought Em to her very first Girl Scout roller skating party, I couldn’t even stand up in my rental skates, let alone lead my child around the oval of the skating arena. I ended up changing back into my sneakers so I could walk her around the scuffed wooden floors, hunched over so I could hold both of her hands as she wobbled and flailed in front of me. I’ve sent my spouse in my stead every year since.

Still, I try to express my love in other ways. 

It’s in the way I pack her lunch every morning, making her half sandwich just the way she likes it, with sliced-up apples and two cookies on the side. 

It’s in the way I manage the unceasing flow of forms and flyers, which flood in from all sides via her take-home folder, my email inbox, and various event invitation platforms. 

It’s in the way I coordinate library holds, instrument rentals, permission slips, swim class makeups, summer camps, and soccer practices, making sure nothing slips through the cracks.

And while I may not be able to make a diorama, I do have some useful skills I’ve picked up over the years.

When my child had to decorate a shirt for the 100th Day of School, I encouraged her cat-themed vision, getting her the supplies she needed to tie-dye a tee and write “meow” 100 times using fabric markers. I then embroidered a gigantic number “100” across the chest, filling it with what felt like an infinite number of tiny French knots. 

When her Girl Scout troop leaders planned a cabin camping trip over two hours away, I went with her, despite being an indoorsy introvert who dreaded all thoughts of hiking, high ropes, and communal living. I hated the trip. I was nauseated from carsickness for half the weekend. I felt sticky from all the skipped showers. I barely slept. But though I remembered my own mom sending me on these trips without her when I was young, I knew Em was happy I was there.

While my mother always cooked out of a sense of obligation, I cook because I enjoy it. I go out of my way to try new recipes, and it’s an unexpected gift when I discover a meal my persnickety child gets excited about. Now, I make her beef empanadas with green olives and hardboiled eggs, and mushroom pizza, and shrimp onigiri, and lemon crinkle cookies. Because while she isn’t really one for culinary variety, she loves what she loves. 

And we are both big readers so, at night, she clambers up onto the bed with me, each of us propped up against our own mountain of pillows, and we do “quiet reading time” together for at least half an hour, her with the latest installment in the Warrior Cats series, me with the latest terrifying horror novel.

And yes, I make sure she sees that I am not just a mother. I work. I practice yoga. I sing in a choir. I watch needlework videos for fun. She is expected to entertain herself during the times I’ve set aside for myself. 

But I have an open-door policy, too. She can always come to me if she needs me. I’ve found a balance where I can care for her while also honoring my own physical and mental health.

It’s not the way my mom did things and, in fact, the thought of trying to emulate my mother exhausts me. But I know Emily can feel how much I love her.

It’s in the way she runs to me at the end of the school day, launching her entire body at me, arms around my waist, legs circling back behind my knees, squeezing me tight. It’s in the way she grabs my hands when I am trying to cook dinner, pulling me into an impromptu kitchen dance party, the two of us spinning around wildly, her eyes on mine, her mouth gaped wide in laughter. It’s in the way her hand slips automatically into mine when we walk down the sidewalk, a small gesture that makes my heart ache every time with the knowledge that, inevitably, there will come a day she doesn’t reach for me. 

When I feel as if I am being suffocated by the needs of my child, I think about her smile. I think about that hand in mine.

Still, the fatigue I feel as the mother of just one child shames me. In it, I see my own inadequacy. I wonder how I will manage when my mother finally accepts my offers of help. I always saw my mother’s expectations for herself as too large, but I carry some of those same expectations for myself. It’s what I owe her, after all. Will she be able to count on me in the way I always counted on her?

***

It didn’t even occur to me that my parents were aging until my mother’s car accident. Forced to confront my mother’s frailty, however, and my father’s self-consciousness over his own signs of aging, it hit me: The moment I’d been dreading had actually arrived. 

Not long after my mother’s accident, I sat propped up in bed with a doorstopper of a book on my lap. With its light blue cover and the small photograph of a middle-aged woman and her silver-haired mom in the lower-right-hand-corner, it screamed self-help. How to Care for Aging Parents, it blared in a stark white serif font. 

“How do you think your parents would feel if they knew you were reading that?” asked my spouse, Michael, smiling at me knowingly. 

He was intimately familiar with my mom’s inability to admit to any weakness, ever. To her intractable need to always take care of us even though, by all rights, we should be the ones to be taking care of her. 

He especially enjoyed regaling people with tales of her throwing down over restaurant bills. One time, we had an event-ruining argument when we tried to take her out for dinner on Mother’s Day. She wanted to pay for her own damn celebration. Another time, my cousin managed to pay for dinner, but only because she showed up to the restaurant before us and gave the servers her card in advance. 

Just the other week, we wrestled each other at a beauty counter register, where I was attempting to gift her new makeup for her birthday. The salesperson looked on, bemused, as I finally managed to slide my card into the machine. Later, in the car, she pulled an envelope out of her purse and thrust a wad of cash at me, covering half the cost of the makeup. I just can’t win.

“God forbid they ever saw this book,” I muttered, dog-earing pages on crucial documents, support services, and tips for daily living. “Your Parent’s Denial,” I read aloud, barking out a laugh. Suddenly, a wave of overwhelm washed over me and I crumpled into myself, blinking back tears.

That was the year Em had started kindergarten, and I was already drowning in forms and handouts and emails for Picture Day, Back-to-School Night, the annual Plant Sale. In just a few months, schools would shut down because of COVID-19. I’d spend the next year and a half juggling a full roster of freelance clients alongside my child’s remote learning, battling a feeling of suffocation over my inability to ever be alone, to ever be without the needs of others pummeling me from all sides. The activities she’d adopt as she grew older—the traveling soccer league, the swim lessons, art camp, band—were all in the future. But in that moment, I already felt defeated.

The term “sandwich generation” was coined by two social workers in 1981 to describe this exact situation. It refers to caregivers “sandwiched” between generations, supporting their aging parents while also managing their kids. This caregiving role is disproportionately held by working mothers, with 70 percent of women (and only 30 percent of men) taking on these responsibilities. This gender disparity can lead to an even greater imbalance in expectations and increase familial stress, causing burnout, sleep issues, guilt, depression, and anxiety. All of this is only compounded by the lack of systemic support for these caregivers.

I already knew this thanks to the research I’d done as a journalist. But despite knowing the tips and tricks recommended by experts for unpaid family caregivers, I still felt paralyzed. 

“How am I going to do this?” I asked Michael, tossing the book to the side. Em was already asleep in her bedroom down the hall, and we were in the in-between time when I could finally breathe before passing out until morning. That night, however, I couldn’t relax. I was too anxious.

“You’ll have your brother to help you, too,” said Michael. “Maybe you two should get together and talk about this stuff.”

I arched an eyebrow. My younger brother and I had already had very different reactions to our parents’ transition into later life. While I scrambled to figure out how I might make their lives easier, he’d responded with impatience over the fact that they didn’t seem to be helping themselves in the manner he deemed appropriate. I wasn’t sure how it would look, us working together to support the people who’d done the hard work of raising us. I didn’t yet know that in just two years, he’d estrange himself from us, and the bigger question would become whether he’d be there for us at all.

***

I think often about what it means to care for someone, and what it means to do it well. As a parent, especially, it’s impossible not to wonder whether you’re doing it right. 

Mothers, in particular, are bombarded on all sides by unsolicited opinions on what it means to be a “perfect parent.” We’re assailed by assertions that, no matter what we do, we’re doing it wrong. 

When you consider these outsized expectations others place upon us—the way our culture venerates motherhood without actually supporting mothers—it’s clear there’s no winning. Still, it’s easy to absorb the judgments of others and think: I’m not good enough.

This self-recrimination only intensifies when you see your own mother as a paragon of motherhood.

I remember the time I lost my temper because Em never cleaned up after herself, and because her cardboard creations were consuming all the space in our living and dining rooms. I stomped into the back room, heaved open the sliding door to the back deck, and dragged two recycling bins into the house, their rolling wheels leaving a path of wet leaves across the hardwood. Then, in a frenzy of uncontrollable rage that was like a wild thing inside me, I ripped apart cardboard houses and cardboard towers and cardboard beds, cramming them into bins that reeked of damp paper while Emily followed close behind, screaming and sobbing. 

Was that loss of control understandable? Was it forgivable? Sure, Em had forgiven me within the hour, but could I ever forgive myself? And would my mother have ever allowed herself to so completely go off the deep end? When I cast my mind back, I can remember my mother’s own moments of emotional overwhelm, when she said things I know she later regretted. I don’t know that there’s any among us who hasn’t been momentarily defeated by motherhood.

I remember, too, the second year of the pandemic, when most of Em’s classmates went back into school on a hybrid schedule and I chose to keep her home full-time. At the end of the school year, I masked her up and sent her in for Move-Up Day, a day during which students meet their teachers for the coming year. I circled back around to the school a half hour later, waiting and watching as other kids trickled out the main doors, drifted over to their parents, and headed back home. Eventually, my daughter emerged, escorted by the school nurse, tears running down her scrunched-up face.

I halved the distance between us and squatted down in front of Em, pulling her toward me, rubbing small circles into her back. “What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.

The nurse leaned toward me. “She thought she was staying the whole day,” she said in a low murmur. 

As I led her away from the school and back to my car, I felt like a monster. All I’d wanted was to keep my child safe. But had I chosen poorly? 

Parenthood is filled with moments such as these. Impossible decisions. In these moments, I tell myself that I am not a good enough mother. And I believe it. 

And sometimes, I allow that train of thought to unspool even further. I follow it to a place where I can’t help but ask myself: 

If I’m not good enough for my child, how can I possibly be good enough for my parents? 

If I am already struggling, how will I fare as they come to need me more? 

How can I possibly—on top of the labor of mothering—give my parents the care they deserve? 

***

Three months ago, I was in my kitchen, assembling empanadas, when my phone began to ring, blasting out a snippet of “Space Unicorn,” an unhinged song about a unicorn who soars through the stars, delivering rainbows all around the world. It shouldn’t be possible to receive bad news when you’re listening to lyrics about marshmallow lasers, but life is filled with impossibilities.

“I wanted to let you know that your father is in the hospital,” said my mom when I answered the phone. “Just in case you were trying to get a hold of us.”

She relayed this information casually, as if they had just popped out to the supermarket. As a result, I wasn’t sure how terrified to feel.

“What?” I asked, startled.

“Remain calm,” she said.

My mom was calling from an emergency room bay, where they had already been languishing for about seven hours without my knowledge. My father had passed out at the gym, she told me. This had already happened twice before. But this time, there’d been difficulty reviving him. EMTs insisted upon admitting him to the hospital so doctors could run tests.

Days later, we learned my dad had several severe blockages in his arteries. Upon delivering the test results, the doctor told my mom they had three options: open-heart surgery, medical management, or a procedure to put in stents and a loop recorder. The first two options felt like a death sentence, so it was a relief when the doctor decided the last option would be best.

My father was in the hospital for a week. At a loss as to how to be useful, I continued to cook, making loaded baked potato empanadas, breaded chicken cutlets with lemon-garlic sauce, vegetable sides, and an apple cider doughnut cake. I dropped Tupperware containers at my parents’ house so my mom would have something to eat when she got home from a full day at the hospital. I had learned from my mom that to feed someone was to care for them. At that point, it was all I knew how to do.

I also drove my mom to and from the hospital when I could. I visited with my dad and joked about the poor book selection in his room and took notes when the cardiologist explained the stent and loop recorder implantation procedures.

At these visits, my mom would inevitably throw me out after not too much time had passed. “I know you have a lot to do,” she’d say.

And on the one hand, this was true. There were client deadlines and choir rehearsals and critique group meetings. There was school pickup in the afternoons. Em’s soccer practices in the evenings. Our home was under renovation.

But at the same time, when I sat down at my computer, all I could do was stare at the blinking cursor in another empty Word document and do nothing. When I got bored with this, I cooked some more, or I wandered about the house aimlessly. I thought about my father. About how helpless I felt. How useless.

Now that he’s home again, stents firmly in place, physically healthier but still in clear cognitive decline, it feels like I’m in a holding pattern again. I keep waiting for my parents to need me. I push gently, offering my help, but I’m afraid to overstep.

Am I doing this right? I don’t know.

The other day, Em and I went over for another visit. And as my child tortured my father, bringing him heaping platters of plastic food—brown ice cream scoops that looked like turds, a slim, pink, plastic square that I think was supposed to be American cheese—I joined my mother upstairs in their home office and finally set up a shared Google Calendar so I could be aware of their various doctors’ appointments, and so they could be aware of my own general availability. I hoped they’d reach out for my help when they felt comfortable doing so.

Afterward, we returned to the living room, and I sank into my usual easy chair while Em demanded our food orders.

As Em careened around the room like a bouncy ball, my mom grabbed her and pulled her in tight for a hug. Em, naturally, lifted her legs and wrapped them around my mom, dangling there as my mom swung her from side to side.

“Emily!” I said sharply. “You’re going to break your Nana.”

“I’m fine,” said my mom dismissively, clearly operating under the delusion that she was invincible. 

I sighed and rolled my eyes.

When she finally released my child to the floor, Em beelined her way back to her play kitchen, loading up another plate with plastic hot dogs and plastic lettuce and a disturbingly orange clump of plastic mac and cheese. “HERE YOU GO!” she screamed, throwing the entire plate at my father. He seemed amused.

My child is ridiculous, I thought, shaking my head, marveling at her boundless energy.

My parents are ridiculous, I thought, thinking of their fierce and stubborn independence.

But I knew I was ridiculous, too. 

—

Steph Auteri’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Her work has twice been listed as Notable by Best American. She is the author of A Dirty Word.