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Mothering Mother: A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir

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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.

I struggled between going to sleep at a decent hour last night and reading the book that I started the same afternoon. Carol D. O'Dell's compelling book, Mothering Mother: A Daughter's Humorous and Heartbreaking Memoir, easily won my familiar battle between sleeping and reading.

Carol and I just had too many similarities, (and a couple of major differences) not to continue reading this page-turner until the bittersweet end.

Carol, a mother of three, with her husband, invited Carol's mother with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's to move in with their family. Carol, an adopted child with no siblings, attempts to fulfill the childhood promise of never putting her mother in a nursing home. Carol struggles to maintain her roles as wife and mother in her own family and roles of daughter, caregiver and mother to her own mother.

I admire Carol for taking on this challenge. I was curious how she managed to accomplish this without losing herself (she almost lost herself a couple of times, and you'll have to read the book yourself to learn the details).

I know about neurological nightmares: I was diagnosed with Parkinson's eleven years ago, my mother is slowly dying of Lewy Body Dementia, my mother-in-law died with/from Parkinson's three years ago. So I'm quite familiar with the emotional roller coaster that Carol is talking about, and you too will resonate with this topic in the future, if you haven't already had a similar experience.

I enjoy Carol's style of writing with her honesty, sensitivity and humor. Her book is a compilation of her journals as short vignettes that she wrote to help her maintain her own sanity, while caring for her aging mother. She says things in her book that others think and feel but are afraid to express.

I laughed and cried as I identified with almost every funny and painful incident and felt like I was in the room with Carol and her mother throughout the entire book.

In fact, after staying up late to finish this book, I woke up early to purchase copies of the book for my brother and sisters, convinced that they too will identify with Carol's challenges in her role as caregiver.

I loved this book, it made me laugh and it made me cry! I thought of my own mother and although she didn't have to linger on for years with a disease, I could relate to what Carol was going through -- and her family. Sometimes I think we forget how hard it is on the rest of the family beyond the primary caregiver. I love the style Carol wrote the book, in small sections, trying to capture events quickly. I would recommend this book to everyone!

A well written book showing the difficulties of caring for an aging parent while still trying to raise your children, maintain a marriage and having to deal with the decline of a parent's health. It reveals the personal frustrations, both physical and emotional, watching a loved one steadily lose their independence while trying to give them the dignity they need.

This book should be read by every woman caring for a mother. I couldn't put it down. I laughed and cried and laughed and cried. It made me feel so good knowing that I am not the only one. It made me realize how much I love my mother despite all the stuff. Thank you!

With unblinking honesty, Carol O'Dell describes the difficult, exhausting job of 24-hour a day caregiving. And with sure, deft strokes, she paints a warm and wrenching portrait of her mother's final months. I was reminded of my favorite passage from The Little Prince, when the child learns that it is the time and trouble we take for another that makes the other so important.

As part of the Pickneyville/Borders writing group, I've had the honor of seeing Carol's writing develop over the past decade. Carol's writing has always been beautiful, drawing the reader into her world. And in every sentence, I can hear Carol's authentic voice. Her book expresses so well who she is.

In MOTHERING MOTHER, Carol has graciously allowed us into her life and thoughts. She's given us a painful and funny account of one of the worst times in life -- a time most of us are fated to experience.

I used to fear reading these kinds of stories. I was afraid it would be like when you're pregnant and everyone delights in telling you horror stories of their deliveries. But Carol's book is not like that. Yes, there are things you never thought of before (like how to deal with an incontinent adult who can't comprehend what's going on), but Carol also tells how she dealt with these things, which doesn't leave the reader hopeless. When I finished this book, I sat on my screened porch listening to the rain, letting her words sink in.

Everyone should read this book. To be fully human is to be present, in relationship, with those around you. Carol has shown us how.

Mothering Mother by Carol D. O'Dell is the author's story of caring for her 90 year old mother who suffered from Parkinson's disease with a couple of years of Alzheimers thrown into mix to keep things interesting. It's a great book and should be on every caregiver's bookshelf. Coincidentally, O'Dell lives here in Jacksonville. When she wrote about walking along the river to clear her head, I imagined she was just down the street. Feeling like we were neighbors who could wave to each other on the occasional outing, made her story even more recognizable somehow.

Not that it was difficult to believe what the author was saying. She wrote honestly, with both humor and candor, about a situation that was neither pretty nor easy. Amazingly O'Dell wrote her book while still raising teenage daughters and going to school herself. What I can't quite figure out is how she managed to care for and clean up after her mother day after day and still have the energy for normal things like shopping, attending church and making love to her husband. I think it helped that her husband was, without a doubt, her best advocate. I like to read about husbands like that.

The similarities in our situations stop with the age of our respective parents, yet O'Dell wrote about my life. In fact, she nailed the business of parenting a parent. Watching the person who raised you cross a somewhat obscure line to become a childlike version of someone you once believed hung the moon is not for sissies. O'Dell paints a word picture with poignant detail. She wrote the story I'd like to write but lack the confidence and know-how.

As children many of us see our parents as almost superhuman beings. In the best circumstances, parents are big, strong, and they take care of us - hold us when we cry, bandage our scrapes, and teach us how to ride bikes. They're always there and a time when they would not be probably never occurs to us.

For many young adults their parents are still nurturers, their childhood homes are still warm places, familiar rooms they visit. Even in those years they may not think that some day roles will be reversed - they will be the care givers for once independent parents who now need to be looked after. This is uncharted territory for most, and it takes a great deal of adjustment. Yet, we can learn from others such as the forthright narrative by Carol O'Dell which tells the story of how she coped and cried when she became the parent and her adoptive mother became a child.

While many offspring who are care givers may find a suitable nursing home or even day care for their aged parents, O'Dell took Noveline, her ill 89-year-old mother, into her home, a home the author shared with her husband and three daughters. The demands of her growing family were already a full-time job - caring for her mother was one more tremendous task.

The author realized that she was going to have to find additional strength from somewhere, and she sought it in nature. We read: "Water is my element, and this holy land that sits on the edge of the sea and sky touches something deep within me. Something in me knows that if I'm going to do more than just get through this, if I'm actually going to thrive, I will need nature to nurture me."

And thrive she did although there were total embarrassments, utter frustrations, and abject degradation. O'Dell spares the reader nothing in her candid picture of what it was like to have Noveline in her home during her declining days. Mothering Mother does not paint a pretty picture but an honest one, sometimes humorous, always inspiring.

Perhaps for Carol O'Dell her book, which is dedicated to her adoptive parents says it all: "Thank you for giving your home, your heart and your lives to a little girl with a fistful of seashells, hoping to belong."

She was given a home and she gave one in return.

- Gail Cooke

Carol O'Dell's MOTHERING MOTHER is a book for all reasons. I gave a copy to a friend who is the aging mother, a mother taking care of a daughter diagnosed with cancer. She scolded me for keeping her awake nights, saying she was unable to put the book down, finding it to be both helpful and entertaining. "It helps," she said, "to know it's okay to feel the way I do. Carol O'Dell says so." She has asked that the assisted living facility where she resides order copies for their library, and she has recommended it to other friends as well. Read it and I'm sure you will too.