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The Truth about Family: "I love my aging parents, but I also want my life back."
Description
Welcome back to Dial Emma, and to the last episode of our latest miniseries, The Truth. This week, we're exploring the unsayable truths about family, and the caregiving roles that we never signed up for.
Our listener, a woman in her fifties whose parents are now in their seventies, wrote to me about the feeling of losing herself while taking on multiple roles in her parents' lives: administrator, technical support, taxi service, crisis manager. She asks a simple question: am I an awful person, for wanting freedom from the people I love?
In this episode, I explore the specific exhaustion that comes from being needed, the feeling of your own middle age being consumed by managing somebody else's later life, and why we can feel grief, resentment, loss and love all at once.
Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.
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