Customer Reviews

Mother in the Middle: A Biologist's Story of Caring for Parent and Child

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a nicely written memoir of one woman's struggle to balance work and family obligations and the pain of seeing one's mother's slow but inexorable deterioration through Alzheimer's disease. What makes this memoir noteworthy is that it is half memoir and half neuroscience primer; Lockhart is a neurobiologist and writes of the changes occurring within the brains of her children and her mother with a dispassionate eye while simultaneously being able to convey the anguish of watching a loved one succumb to a truly nasty disease. This merging of science and memoir makes this book distinctive, but I am not convinced it was entirely successful. Readers who are curious about the inner workings of the brain will find the science digressions interesting and informative; others who care primarily about Lockhart's narrative may find the digressions overly long and intrusive.

I was impressed by the raw honesty Lockhart was able to express about some of life's most personal and private relationships. She relates arguments with her husband with an immediacy that I almost felt like an uncomfortable eavesdropper, but I found in those passages the echo of all my own complicated ambivalence about attempting to Do It All as a working mom. And perhaps the aspect of the book I found most heartrending and compelling was Lockhart's admission that she felt angry at her mother for not being the mother she wanted her to be. Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, have had similar feelings at one point or another. Reading Lockhart's journey as she confronted and ultimately adapted to her conflicting emotions helped me to recognize and process those feelings in myself--and that is a hallmark of a worthy book.

Kids to the left of me, my husband to the right, here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.
(My apologies to Egan and Rafferty)

That's an entire generation of us; on the one side teens testing our resolve (or, in Lockhart's case, kids so small they're just now learning to walk and talk!) and, on the other, an aging parent or two fraying our nerves. If you have been there, are currently doing that, or realize that you will go down that road some time in the future, this book validates, informs, and prepares. All of it, the wildly conflicting emotions, the mad dash out the door of your work to your parent's home, the frantic phone calls, the more or less tolerant spouse waiting at home--there's no dilemma or emotion Ms. Lockhart leaves unshared.

But, as a twist to yet another Sandwich Generation expose, the author brings the unique perspective of a neurobiologist in the middle--developing brains to the left and degenerating brains to the right (and do check out "Memory Lessons" by Jerald Winakur for a physician's take on this old, demented parent thing). I wish Ms. Lockhart had more deftly woven her scholarly brain text into her seamless personal narrative--at times they meld perfectly but sometimes there's too many paragraphs of physiology stuck in the pages with you. That said, just scan the parts that are a little too dry, and DO NOT MISS the last fifty pages. They're perfect!

Mother in the Middle is a poignant memoir of a woman taking care of her young daughters and her mother, who has early-onset Alzheimer's. Sybil has a background in neurobiology, so her observations of her daughters' mental growth and her mothers' regression are particularly insightful.

This book does a fine job of weaving in the scientific background to the story. At times it does get a little too scientific, but for the most part it is very well done.

I am really impressed by the honesty Sybil Lockhart displays in this book. On the whole, Sybil is a saint in her caring for her mother, but she explains all her emotions and reactions - even the ones that you'd hesitate to confide to a close friend. It's wonderful validation to those of us that struggle with not-quite-sainthood in caring for aging relatives.

I was a bit disappointed that the memoir was unbalanced, telling us far more about the mother's regression than the daughters' development. I would have been even more intrigued if the girls' growth was highlighted a little more.

What a fascinating look at a familiar subject -- when Sybil Lockhart's mother began her devestating descent into Alzheimer's, Sybil found herself caring for both her parent and her daughters. What makes this caregiver's tale different from so many others is that Lockhart is a trained neurobiologist, and understood what was occuring to her mother on a cellular level. Lockhart is a deft and gifted writer, and takes the reader on an amazing journey through the brain -- not only through her mother's decline, but at the same time she also describes the changes occurring to her young children, whose brains were making fundamental leaps forward even as her mother's brain shut down.

Lockhart presents clinical information extremely well, but also tempers it with a very moving account of the agonizing pain of a child having to step in and care for their parent. Lockhart also does not shy away from describing the severe impact that caring for her mother had on her marriage. A very good book.

This was not an easy book to read, both because the subject matter is a little scary (Alzheimer's), and because Ms. Lockhart hasn't quite found her voice, especially in the first 50 pages. The book alternates between a fairly straightforward account of her life (meeting her husband, moving forward in her career, having her kids, and worrying about her mother) and explaining the biological processes going on while interspersing it with the emotions and events. She isn't quite successful with the biology. Even though I am trained as a scientist and used to reading technical prose, I found it hard to cut through her biological descriptions when she tried to heap all kinds of lyrical metaphor on top. It was jarring in some passages as she tried to interweave intense feeling and neurotransmitters into a single paragraph.

I put the book down after the first chapters and then came back.

I'm glad I did. As the book went on, Ms. Lockhart became more skilled at her writing, and perhaps also the kinds of events happening later in the memoir were better suited to integration with the biological explanations. Her honesty in writing about how her blind spots affected how she related to her mother and her husband was valuable, and I think would be echoed by a lot of mothers. I saw aspects of myself - some of the less attractive aspects - from time to time, and I learned some lessons from this memoir that I will try to retain. Any mother who has juggled the worries of career, kids, spouse, and elders will resonate with the emotional aspects of the story.

I also appreciated the strong sense of California permeating the story, and how difficult it was for her to deal with packing up her mother's life out of her childhood home. And I learned a little about how we relate to the elderly: it gave me a chance to realize that how we see an older person is quite different if we knew her when she was at her best, instead of only in decline.

If neuroscience isn't your thing, you can skip over the passages that wax scientific and still get a lot from this memoir.

I would rate this at 3 1/2 stars, but I'll round up.

This is a thoughtful, sensitive memoir relevant to any of us in the "sandwich generation," parenting young children while also caring for our aging parents. Sybil Lockhart's unique spin on the tale is that she's a biologist, and she understands -- and can explain, elegantly -- the neuroscience behind her developing daughters' brains and her mother's sadly degenerating mind. The science is fascinating and every bit as engrossing as the rich family story Lockhart tells.

While the story of dealing with an aging parent, while being a parent at the same time is not a new one, this book creates new ways to see it all. As a biologist who is a solid writer, Lockhart is able to explain what is happening to her mom from a neurobologist's stand point. It is fascinating to read about the biology of the brian in both her aging mother and her growing young girls. Far from dry, Lockhart has a tender touch. Her writing is honest and has a ring of truth that feels like a deep reach down into your heart. I couldn't put it down. And I am so looking forward to reading more from this new and promising writer!

Mother in the Middle was a poignant story of caring for a parent as well as your children. I thought that the additional medical background the author was able to provide from her unique perspective as a neuroscientist was insightful and still held a personal touch. I found this book to be personal for me as my two of my mother's sisters have both been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and there is some concern that my own mother may also follow this same path. However I would still recommend this book to anyone as the story is about personal growth, family, and loss.

I will tell you part of the reason I am giving this a 5 star is her brutally honest way she exposed her story.
I don't know if I could have been so forthcoming, maybe it was like therapy for her.
I believe this to be an excellent book. Her background in the scientific side really made it interesting even you haven't had to think about dealing with the emotional side of having a loved one go through Alzheimer's, while still living your own life, or trying to.
I am already recommending and loaning out my copy.

This book was so much more than I expected. I figured it would be an interesting viewpoint, a biologist explaining Alzheimer's and contrasting it with the development of her young girls. That is was, but in a lyrical and moving way, with much more to the story. I had worried it would have a structure I have come to really dislike, that of one chapter about the "now" alternating with one about pure science, with not enough of either. Instead, the science is blending in, and this is much more memoir than science, although I did learn a lot from what I read.

The best part of this book, for me, was the honesty. Sybil Lockhart doesn't shy away from really exposing what she felt about caring for her mother---the intense love but also the irritation, the anger, the denial and the despair. She also is honest about the affects of her mother's illness on her marriage, and even that there is more to that to the tension she has with her husband. She also talks so wonderfully about the feelings we can have for a house, as she sells her childhood home. There is even much here about that never-ending conflict between career and mothering.

I think when Lockhart became a biologist, it was probably lucky for that field, but I think she is a rare example of someone that really was meant to be a writer. It is probably lucky she wasn't one from the start, however, because her writing avoids the feeling so many memoirs have, that was written long along in her mind and in college classes, and that she was just waiting for a life event to pin it on. This is real writing, and I hope she writes much more.