Kathy Lawrence
Are sex and love taboo topics for you and your parents?
Don’t be afraid to talk to your parent about love and sex, advises Relate counsellor and author, Barbara Bloomfield. They’ve got the same hopes and dreams as you have, but are probably just a bit shyer of talking about it. After my mother was widowed in her sixties, I used to see quite a bit […]
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And Fred came too: the struggle to care for a grieving step-parent
This week’s storyteller is Barbara. When Barbara’s mother passed away, Barbara was left to care for her mother’s second husband who stayed on in the granny flat. Despite Barbara’s best efforts, it was hard to make the relationship work. My father died 33 years ago, and eventually Mummy met and married Fred, who was some […]
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How tradition makes living with dad the obvious choice
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous. Their cultural background made the decision to share a home with a widowed parent easy for one family. Our storyteller explains how the arrangement works and its ups and downs. My husband and I married 14 years ago. For the first 5 years of our married life […]
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Older but not over the hill
Written by Rebecca Lenton This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous. There’s a societal habit of associating old age with decrepitude. Because someone is elderly they automatically can’t do things for themselves. They can’t hear and see as they used to and therefore they’re considered incapable. This widely shared assumption seems to create an […]
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Ups and downs of moving mum in
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous. One of our readers tells us how her mum moved from Zimbabwe to live in the family home in the UK at the age of seventy-six. Seven years on, she talks about why it happened and how well it’s working. And we asked her husband what he […]
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Bridging the distance between us
This week’s storyteller is Sally.When Sally’s parents both became ill and dependent on others, Sally resisted the pressure to turn her life upside down and go home to help. She tells us about the struggle to help from a distance and relieve the load on family who stayed nearby. At the young age of 49, […]
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Helping our parents to feel that they’re not a burden
We’re bound to feel frustrated with our parents sometimes, but do we want them to feel eternally grateful to us? You’ve given up yet another Sunday to spend it in A&E with a parent. Your partner’s come too, and between you you’ve been running errands all afternoon – driving off to your parent’s house to […]
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Coming home – or at least nearby
This week’s storyteller has chosen to be anonymous.When’s the right time to move a parent to be close to you? Does removing some parental challenges mean introducing new ones? My mum is a healthy lady in her early 70s. She and dad moved away from our home town some years ago, building a full and […]
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I can’t believe you said that
Remember when you hit that age in your teens when overnight your parents seemed to become excruciatingly embarrassing? You didn’t want to be seen in their space because you never knew when they would next say something truly toe-curling? Well here’s some news for you. It could be about to happen again. Here are two […]
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Review: The Hilton on Park Lane
Written by Kathy Lawrence We’re always looking for opportunities for families to enjoy time together, so when the Hilton on Park Lane invited us to see what’s on offer for the “silver” generation, we went armed with a list of questions but prepared to enjoy. Our review looks separately at Afternoon Tea and overnight stays. […]
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