SnoopyLove Posted June 17, 2026
NYT gift article: The Pain of Caring for a Parent Who Abused You
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/magazine/elder-care-parent-abuse.html
Interesting but devastating profile of people caregiving the now frail, elderly parents who abused them when they were children. While reading it the many, many posters on this forum who are doing their best for parents who were neglectful, absent, mean or worse passed through my mind.
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“It started in January 2024, with a call from her father’s eye doctor. Did Carole know that Andre was still driving, even though his vision was so poor? Even though it was illegal to drive with eyesight so bad?
“Well, no, she didn’t; she made a point not to know this sort of thing about her father. Also, she didn’t really care.”
….
“And there was her father, 93, standing by the front door, on that filthy rug, next to the maroon-colored walker that he hated to use. Looking small, looking weathered. Carole didn’t want to stay, but she stayed, and later she would think that she never really had a choice to do otherwise. Her sister would have nothing to do with Andre — they had been estranged for years — and by then his siblings were all either dead or too old to help him. Maybe she could have just walked away, left her father to become a ward of the state, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “I have enough integrity,” Carole, who is 58, told me. “And I have to be able to live with myself after that [expletive] is dead.”
….
“The visit led to hours of help a week, and later hours each day. Carole took Andre to his appointments. She managed his finances and his medications. She ran his errands. She answered his endless calls and text messages. Andre had some savings from his decades of working as a newspaper typesetter, but he refused to spend anything on his care. He said he didn’t need it. And while his doctor agreed with Carole that her father clearly had some dementia, he told her that she couldn’t force him to pay for caregivers or cleaners or anything else. So that was that.”
….
“But there were things she wouldn’t do: embrace her father, for instance. Whenever Carole drove Andre anywhere, she would make him sit in the passenger’s seat until she could get his walker from the trunk and position it by the door, and she would put a hand on his back or his arm to steady him, but she wouldn’t take him into her arms.”
“When Carole first became a caregiver for her father, she joined Parenting Aging Parents, a Facebook group with nearly 40,000 members, most of them women. Carole read the message board, but she didn’t see her situation reflected in many of the comments. The other people in the group seemed to have had good parents, or at least good-enough parents, who in turn earned their children’s support in old age. Carole felt like a lone caregiver whose sense of obligation came without all the cozy feelings.
“Soon enough, though, she began to see that there were others like her….
“Some had parents who never said “I love you”; who never tried very hard; who never took an interest. Others had parents who hurt them. Many were harmed in the usual, derivative ways — with belts and closed fists and neglect and humiliation — but some had parents who were more inventive in their infliction of pain. A woman whose father would swing her sister around by her ponytail. A man whose drunken mother used to wake him up at night to tell him that he was a “piece of —-” for hours on end, so he couldn’t sleep.
“They all had their reasons for looking after parents who seemed so undeserving. They said they had to because there was nobody else. Because they couldn’t afford paid nursing aides, or because they couldn’t find any in their small town. Some did it because of Catholic guilt, because of other kinds of guilt. Because the sight of a once-robust parent, now degraded and infirm, had unmoored them. In Florida, a woman agreed to care for her father because he had apologized for everything. In Delaware, another women did the same because even though her father used to beat her, he later defended her, to her mother, when she came out as gay.
“They did it because they wanted the inheritance. Because they believed that a child’s duty to a parent was unconditional. Because “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Because they hadn’t realized how hard it would be; how expensive it would be; how long their parents would hold on. Some did it because their fathers were too weak to hurt them now. Because they wanted to be good people. Because one thing led to another, and now there was nothing to do but endure it.”