Mothering Mother
by Carol D. O'Dell
Published by Kunati Inc.
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Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart
Subtitled: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir
Carol O’Dell is my new heroine. I made the promise too: “Look after each other.” I haven’t truly had to do that yet, with the daily exception of a phone call. After reading Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir, I’m not sure that I will ever be able to do what she did. Care for an aging parent long after the time has come when it was too much: physically, emotionally, mentally, and sometimes even spiritually.
Told in vignettes instead of a linear fashion, O’Dell tells in brutal honesty the horrors and pleasures of exactly what one shoulders when saying, “Come live with us; I’ll take care of you.”
The vignettes are linear as they recount bits of O’Dell’s adoption, at age four, by a Southern,fundamentalist couple in their mid-fifties. When O’Dell’s mother is diagnosed with Parkinson’s and her husband in transferred to Florida, the O’Dells do an addition to their home so that her mother could have her own place, albeit connected to the main structure. Add a heart condition and Alzheimer’s, and her mother is not an easy person to care for. Once a vibrant minister, watching the mother shrink to helplessness is more horrifying than any Stephen King novel I have ever read. The way the mother trashes her apartment as diseases attack her body and mind makes what some over-privileged rock star’s rampage look like a walk on the beach.
In addition to O’Dell’s strength, is the strength her family endures and embraces. They have their moments, but they don’t fall apart. I’m in awe of what the O’Dell family endured.
Before reading Mothering Mother: A Daughter’s Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir, I can’t recall an honest look at what it’s really, really, really like for those Baby Boomers who are trying to care for both an aging, ill parent and raise children, too. How does one watch one life start to slip away and other lives blossom? It seems impossible.
This book would never work if the structure were different. A different structure would minimize the agony and the ecstasy of O’Dell and her family’s experience.
Armchair Interviews says: This is the look in someone’s window most of us never want to have to deal with in our own life.
Author’s Web site: http://www.caroldodell.com