Being Care-Full Requires Parental Supervision

Almost daily, May Lagman is reminded of the years when her children were young. Only now she is caring for her 80-year-old mother.

“In many ways caring for my mother is similar to caring for a small child who needs constant attention,” she says. Besides tending to physical requirements, such as bathing her and providing food, Lagman must also deal with her need for attention.

“Every time my husband and I dress up for a party or other function, my mother wants to go with us, and I feel guilty about not being able to take her,” she says. “Before I leave, she says that she’ll miss me and will go to the window to watch us leave.”

As individuals over 65 make up the fastest growing segment of the population, Lagman’s story isn’t unusual. At least 7 million Americans are involved in caring for a parent. Seventy-five percent to 80% of the care provided for aging adults comes from the family.

When aging parents live at home with adult children, it can add richness to family life, says licensed clinical social worker Lynne Conger of Community Counseling Services at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, which provides a variety of services to seniors and their families. “A multigenerational household has a lot to offer everyone in the family.”

Having an aging parent living in the home is not without its problems, however. “Care-giving is much more stressful than many people realize,” says Joyce Bryan, director of the Orange Caregiver Resource Center in Fullerton. One major reason for the stress is the lack of affordable in-home assistance, she says.

Adult children who care for their parents face myriad challenges, including finding day care and finding time for themselves.

However, for many in-home care is the only acceptable solution.

“Having parents in the home keeps them out of institutions, which is important to many families,” says medical social worker Teresa Rutherford, who works at V.I.P. Adult Day Health Care Center in Santa Ana. “After an initial period of adjustment, many families find that running a multigenerational household works very well.”

Four Orange County families share what it’s like when an adult child and parent live together.

May Lagman, 54, has a husband, grown children, grandchildren and a full-time job as a dietary supervisor in an El Toro skilled nursing facility for older adults. Although Lagman’s work enables her to understand the changes that occur during the later years, she admits to the challenges of living with her mother, Victoria Crisanto, 80, who moved into her Orange home in 1987.

Lagman says her mother loves to socialize. “She really likes to be around people, so she’ll get all dressed up and want to go out,” says Lagman.

Crisanto used to stay at home alone all day. “When I got home from work exhausted, she’d be all dressed up and ready to go out,” says Lagman. “I’d often take her out just because I felt so badly about her being at home all day.”

Now Crisanto goes to the Santa Ana V.I.P. Center every weekday. “Sending her to the center has been wonderful,” says Lagman. “My mother loves it because it gives her a place where she can talk to other people her age and get involved in age-appropriate activities. It’s also very convenient because they pick her up and drop her off.”

For Lagman there has never been any question of caring for her mother. “In the Filipino culture you take care of your parents; it’s normal. It never occurred to me to put her in a home. Maybe later if she needs constant care I might consider it, but I’m not sure how I would do that.”

Close family ties are very important to all of the Lagman’s, including May’s daughter, Jessica Barajas, 28, who is married with children ages 2 and 11 months. Until recently Barajas lived with her mother and grandmother and is grateful for the opportunity her children have had to get to know their great-grandmother.

“Family is important, and I try to show my children that,” she says. “My grandmother and 2-year-old daughter will sit on the couch together and talk; it’s really cute. I think that’s when my grandmother is at her best.”

At Christmas when Albert Dale flew from Oklahoma to visit his daughter, Peggy Compton, in Santa Ana, he had no idea he’d end up staying. A few days after arriving, Dale, 81, collapsed and was hospitalized with heart trouble. Recuperating in his daughter’s home, he has settled in.

Though Compton, 58, has had to make some lifestyle adjustments, she says she’s been delighted to have him.

“We’ve had some close conversation that we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” she says. “He likes to talk about his childhood, and I enjoy listening. My mother passed away last May, and the thought of losing another parent so soon is unbearable. I really cherish this time together.”

Dale says that he has also enjoyed staying with his daughter. “She takes awful good care of me; I couldn’t complain,” he says, noting how she enrolled him at the V.I.P. center in Santa Ana where she drops him off on her way to work as an office manager for an electronic power supply company in Irvine.

“She likes to have someone watch over me, because she’s afraid I’ll fall,” he says. “She really looks after me, and that makes me feel special.”

Compton will leave Dale at home to go shopping or to a restaurant with her husband, Jerry, but she is not comfortable leaving him alone for long periods of time.

She has also found that she’s not as relaxed as she used to be. “When my father is out of my sight, I’m always listening for noises,” she says. “The other night I heard a thump in the bathroom, and I was in there in two seconds. He had just dropped the soap.”

They have night lights on around the house. She puts a urinal and water beside his bed so that he doesn’t have to leave his room during the night. The Comptons have also rearranged their furniture so that he can easily grab hold of something if he gets dizzy.

Compton has also found that her household duties have increased considerably. She now plans and cooks dinner every evening, and her laundry has doubled.

“My husband and I used to go out to eat a lot more, which we enjoyed, but now we stay home and I cook. It was a big adjustment getting dinner on the table every night,” she says.

Jerry Compton, 52, agrees. “We aren’t able to pick up on the spur of the moment and go. But it makes Peggy feel good to know that she is able to return some of the caring she got from her parents when she was growing up, and that’s important.”

“The benefits of taking care of my father have far outweighed the disadvantages,” she says. “I’m an only child, and my father has no other children to help him, but I don’t feel like it’s an imposition at all. Even if I had a lot of siblings, I would want to do what I’m doing. My father won’t be here forever. I’m doing the best I can to make his last days as happy as possible.”

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For the first few years Vincent Malafronte’s mother lived with her son in his Yorba Linda home, she was able to care for herself. She got around by bus and dial-a-ride, visiting friends and attending events. At night she would eat with Malafronte and his wife and share the day’s events.

But when Malafronte’s mother reached her mid-80s she began showing signs of dementia. Today she needs almost constant care.

“Although she can feed herself and walk around, she is very forgetful and frail and needs direction with many tasks,” says Malafronte, 56, who works for a bank in Costa Mesa. “Sometimes she requires help dressing and must be supervised in the shower.”

Constant care can be very wearing, says Malafronte. “This is a 24-hour job that you don’t get a break from,” he says, noting that his mother sometimes wanders around at night, which prevents him from getting a full night’s sleep. “When she wakes up and walks around, I have to get up and direct her back to bed.”

Malafronte would like to find affordable, quality respite care that would allow him and his wife to get away now and then. The only time he and his wife have alone together now is about two hours after his mother goes to bed.

“You really need a break to recharge your batteries,” he says. “It would be nice to get away every once in awhile.”

However, it’s hard enough for Malafronte to get good, affordable respite care while he is at work.

“We have someone who comes in two afternoons a week to play games with my mother and bathe and feed her so she is ready for bed by the time we get home from work,” he says. “Two other days she goes to a day-care center, which has been a fantastic break for all of us. There she gets exercise and people to talk to.”

The remainder of the time Malafronte’s mother is cared for by family members, which often takes a lot of juggling.

“As a child, it was not unusual for me to have a grandparent around,” he says. “There has only been one uncle in my family who had to be put into a facility because he had Alzheimer’s and became very destructive. Everyone else has been cared for at home.”

Malafronte says that keeping his mother with the family is important.

“As long as she is able to communicate and doesn’t need 24-hour constant medical care, she can stay with us,” he says. “I still can’t beat her at Scrabble.”

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For Estella Hernandez there wasn’t much of a break between raising her five sons and caring for her father, Lucas Acedo, 76. Because of a number of strokes, her father must be supervised 24 hours a day, a job that Hernandez, 48, has taken on almost single-handedly.

The strokes have caused Acedo to live in the past and wander unless supervised. Hernandez must stay with him in their La Habra apartment around the clock. Taking him out with her isn’t possible, because he gets paranoid in the car.

“I recently took him in the car, and he told me to stop and tried to jump out,” she says. “My sister and her little girl were with us, and they were really upset. By the time we got home, I was ready to jump out of the car myself.”

Hernandez also dispenses his medication, cooks for him and deals with his erratic sleep behavior.

Every night she stays up with him until he falls asleep, which can sometimes be 1 a.m. or later.

“It’s like having a child in the house,” she says. “He needs supervision. I can’t relax and go to sleep until he’s asleep.”

Hernandez gets little time to herself.

“I have brothers and sisters, but I’m the only one who isn’t caring for children right now,” she says. “One of my sisters comes to help me sometimes, but she lives far away and has children of her own.”

Hernandez hopes to be able to have someone come in a few times a week in the near future to provide her with some relief care so that she can get out and go grocery shopping and maybe even see a movie now and then. She’s also looking for a house to rent so that she can lock the gate and not worry so much about her father wandering off.

Doctors have advised Hernandez to put Acedo in a home, but she doesn’t want to. “There is still a lot left in him, and so far I’m able to keep him at home,” she says.

Although Hernandez does get upset with her father and feels depressed at times, she says that if she gets a little help, she’ll be able to continue caring for him.

“I can’t say how much longer; it depends on how bad he gets. But I will try my hardest as long as I can,” she says. “The bottom line is that I feel good about what I’m doing. This is the best thing for him right now, and that’s what counts.”