by Amina Sani

Created on: January 18, 2009

Absolutely not! Children should not be obligated to care for their elderly parents. If they want to - great! But they shouldn't be made to feel guilty if they choose not to.

Based on my personal experience, I feel very strongly about this issue.

Here's my story:

When I was 6 my mother remarried and decided she no longer wanted me so she left me with my grandparents - wonderful people who brought me up with a strong sense of value, self-respect and responsibility. From ages 6 to 11, I did not hear from my mother, not a phone call nor a birthday card, although every month she would send my grandparents money for my care.

When I turned 12, my mother had a debilitating stroke and her husband left her, so my grandparents sent me back to live with her (My grandparents are Asian and in their culture, it is the children's responsibility to care for elderly parents).

For four years, I nursed my mother back to health and those years were the worst years of my life. My mother is a horrible, manipulative woman, I quickly learned. Everyday she called me names - ugly, fat, stupid, lazy, you name it - and forced me to drop out of school, claiming that as my mother, she should have top billing in my life.

Throughout the time we lived together, we fought constantly about food (she didn't want to feed me) and money (she thought I owed her rent since I now lived with her) - She's insane! I survived because of neighbors and family, who gave me food and daily encouragement to stick it out because I was being a "good daughter" and "doing the right thing" by taking care of her.

Most of my teen years revolved around my mother - I fed, bathed, brought her to doctor's appointments, helped her with her exercises - and then as soon as she recovered, her husband showed up and again she decided she didn't want me anymore and threw me out on the streets in the middle of winter, with not a penny to my name, and I ended up homeless at 16, sleeping in the subways in NYC (my grandparents went back to Asia).

Despite a horrid childhood and being scarred from that experience, I turned out relatively well. Got back to school, finished college, bought a house etc - and now my mother is older and sickly. Her husband left her again, and now she wants to move in with me, and I said, NO WAY!

That woman put me through hell. And though I've recovered from that experience and have since forgiven her, I see that she hasn't changed a bit - she has another daughter, my half sister, and for the same reasons, she doesn't want to have anything to do with her.

I absolutely refuse to let a person like that in my life ever again.

She lives alone in an apartment, though recently she's started a campaign involving friends and family to "guilt trip" me into letting her back in my life. Every week I get messages from these suckers saying that she's my mother and therefore it's my responsibility to care for her, yadda yadda yadda, and I tell them to shut it.

I've been down that road before and I will not go there again.

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