Who Gets the China?
A humorous and useful guide to saving your sanity while helping your parents live better, longer.
Are your parents aging? Same. Are you thankful? Yes! Is managing this transition driving you a little bit crazy? Me too. I hear you.
I love my parents and am so thankful to have them as active participants in my life, even at 55. But helping them live longer and independently can make you laugh, cry and want to pull your hair out. Virtually every friend I have is experiencing some element of this while also launching their kids into adulthood. Several of my group chats regularly blow up with the latest parental escapade, frustration, or challenge.
The Power of Community
I believe there is power in sharing these experiences, learning from one another to guide us through this transition with a bit more grace and our sanity in tact.
My generation read all the baby and child rearing books we could get our hands on when we were expecting our first baby. We baby-proofed (thank goodness because kids love electrical sockets), made birth plans (what a waste of mental energy), hired lactation consultants (a godsend) and whipped up our own organic baby food in the name of raising our kids as best we could.
We’re willing and wired to apply that same commitment to helping our parents live as well as they can, as long as they can. I haven’t found an online source that speaks to me authentically about this experience. My parents don’t look or sound like the standard white haired stock photos I see in so many ads or articles. They are paving their own way, and therefore so are we.
The goal of this endeavor is to create a resource to help us laugh, cry and embrace the messiness of this phase but also help us make good decisions during unprecedented times.
Why “Who Gets the China?”
If you are lucky, your parents are living in their own home and you have a loving family and siblings to help you through this journey.
In reality, you are facing a move to a “retirement community” aka “assisted living facility” and have a week or two of vacation time to sort through the china cabinet full of “family heirlooms” nobody really has space for or time to polish.
Even if you have the luxury of time, you still have to go through it all and divvy it up or send it to GoodWill or try to sell half of it on Facebook Marketplace. There might be yellow sticky notes stuck on Christmas tchotchkes, subversive assignments of silverware to not-quite relatives; blank looks about who has to take, I mean gets to take, Nanny’s bright pink and green crocheted quilts from the 1950s; and fights over who gets the floral wedding china.
For me, this phase of life is alternately heartbreaking and hysterically funny. “Who gets the china?” sums up so much about this time of life. If we can’t laugh, we’ll go crazy. (But seriously, dibs on the china. I’m the oldest.)
