Poetry and Adult Children

For Exhausted Caregivers…

This wonderful poem by John O’Donohue speaks to the world of caregivers who can quickly lose their mooring and are looking for language, strategies and rituals to help them recover from these unavoidable forays into in “empty time.” For One…

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The Heart of Caregiver’s Resilience

Caregiver’s resilience is a mind set that guides action, an oath to meet failure and keep going, to rise above the unfairness of it all. The last stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life” is an anthem…

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Losing Your Way…

Caregivers are always beginning a new. It comes with the work. Time and again they are knocked off their balance point and scramble to find a way to get back up. The art of caregiver recovery is made easier with…

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The Long Tail of Parental Regret

Some childhoods turn out poorly leaving a trail of emotional scars and dysfunctional behaviors. Survivors are left to make the best of it. While dreaming of a Hollywood moment, none of them expect an abusive or absent parent to ever…

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Poetry and Adult Children, Part 3

Below the perpetual buzz of our busy caregiving lives is another channel, softer in tone and kinder in character. We sense it in vertical moments where rushing and worrying get sidetracked, the chance second where life sparks back a fragment…

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Toxic Parents and Adult Children

It’s the luck of the draw as to which childhood any of us inherit. Sometimes it’s filled with toxic parents who leave abusive tattoos that last a lifetime. Remarkably, they wind up under our care with the same bag of…

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Poetry and Adult Children

Moving through middle age is a polyphasic lightening round of commingled dilemmas. No one captures the tone and pace of this developmental tango better than Jeanne Marie Beaumont in her poem Afraid So. Afraid So By Jeanne Marie Beaumont Is…

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