Dear friend,
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you.
I called my mother Tuesday to check on her blood pressure medication and somehow ended up being the one who cried. Not her. Me. I sat in the parking lot at work for ten minutes after we hung up because she sounded so much older on the phone than she does in my memory of her, which is apparently frozen around the year I was nineteen. That gap between the mother I carry in my head and the one who needs help opening pill bottles now is doing something to me I have not named yet.
I keep thinking about how caring for aging parents rearranges you without asking permission first. Exodus 20:12 has been sitting on me this week, the part about honoring father and mother. I always heard that as a child's verse, something for someone small. It reads different now, on this side of it, when honoring them means paperwork and hard phone calls and watching someone who used to be in charge of everything become the one who needs to be walked through it slowly.
What has surprised you most about who your parents have become as they've needed more from you?
A prayer
God, this reordering of who cares for whom is heavy in ways she did not expect. Give her patience for the small tasks and comfort for the grief underneath them. Steady her tonight. Amen.