Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

7 Tips to Make Labor Day Midlife- Sibling Stress Free

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Happy Labor Day. 

If you are working with midlife siblings to solve elder care issues and they are attending a Labor Day barbecue-  

Here are 

Suggestions to make the ritual of Labor Day –  a holiday to be enjoyed by midlife siblings and their families  – not dreaded like the annual Thanksgiving dinner where Mom burns the turkey and your uncle gets drunk and sings. 

Here are 7 tips to help them keep the Labor Day heartburn free without a midlife sibling to build a midlife sibling team over aging Mom and Dad issues.

1) Don’t discuss politics. In this era of the Trump presidency with so many families at odds over President The Democratic Presidential Race ,Trump, the Russian hacking investigation, DOMA, the building of the ” Mexican Wall ” –politics can be lethal to families. Spare siblings, and guests. This is bloodier than the civil war with so many kin at opposite poles. So keep it positive and light or just plain pass the time of day. And whatever you do, don’t drink too much and forget the ban on politics.

2) Remember that it is a family gathering and it is not “all about you”.Suggest keeping a positive attitude for the sake of aging parents, if they are there,  and  kids, who will model bad sibling behavior when they face parent- care in the future

3) Call email or Facebook, Evite everyone ahead of time. Ask everyone to bring a dish to share. That is the beginning of building a sibling family team- sharing food. Call every midlife sibling and family member. Do not exclude. Again to build a team effort.

4) Attempt to get all midlife siblings to plan activities ahead and jointly work to make them happen-with a sibling team spirit. Think of softball games, horseshoes, and a treasure hunt, anything that everyone can have joint ideas about beforehand. Use Facebook to do this- hopefully, all your siblings are your Facebook friends.

5) Arrange to split the bill for beverages like alcohol and soft drinks, again sibling team effort. Remember to go light on alcohol because, like the recent Houston explosion caused by hurricane flooding, alcohol can detonate sibling warfare.

6) Share jobs- setting up tables, bringing in equipment for sports or games, lawn chairs- especially ‘manning” the barbecue. (Sisters can cook too) Share it and don’t let anyone be top dog –be the chosen chef, unless everyone is fine with that.This is again modeling a sibling team about helping an aging Mom and Dad.

6) It is a party, not a sibling family meeting. If you want to talk about personal issues, make a date in the future to get together with your angry sister/brother.

7) Don’t make this a family meeting where old sibling grudges get hashed out.It is a holiday.

IF you are an ALCA member or GCMCheck out the chapter ” Working With Adult Aging Siblings” by Cathy Cress and Kali C Peterson in  Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family – for a deeper dive into how to work with midlife siblings around aging parent care. 

Also, you could apply this to any labor day gathering with siblings and just leave out the aging parent issue.

HAVE A HAPPY LABOR DAY

7 Tips to Make Labor Day Midlife- Sibling Stress Free

Dys-fam90264_CH22_FIG02.jpg

 

Happy Labor Day. 

If you are working with midlife siblings to solve elder care issues and they are attending a Labor Day barbecue-  

Here are 

Suggestions to make the ritual of Labor Day –  a holiday to be enjoyed by midlife siblings and their families  – not dreaded like the annual Thanksgiving dinner where Mom burns the turkey and your uncle gets drunk and sings. 

Here are 7 tips to help them keep the Labor Day heartburn free without a midlife sibling to build a midlife sibling team over aging Mom and Dad issues.

1) Don’t discuss politics. In this era of the Trump presidency with so many families at odds over President Trump, Charlotteville, the Russian hacking investigation, DOMA, the building of the ” Mexican Wall ” –politics can be lethal to families. Spare siblings, and guests. This is bloodier than the civil war with so many kin at opposite poles. So keep it positive and light or just plain pass the time of day. And whatever you do, don’t drink too much and forget the ban on politics.

2) Remember that it is a family gathering and it is not “all about you”.Suggest keeping a positive attitude for the sake of aging parents, if they are there,  and  kids, who will model bad sibling behavior when they face parent- care in the future

3) Call email or Facebook, Evite everyone ahead of time. Ask everyone to bring a dish to share. That is the beginning of building a sibling family team- sharing food. Call every midlife sibling and family member. Do not exclude. Again to build a team effort.

4) Attempt to get all midlife siblings to plan activities ahead and jointly work to make them happen-with a sibling team spirit. Think of softball games, horseshoes, and a treasure hunt, anything that everyone can have joint ideas about beforehand. Use Facebook to do this- hopefully, all your siblings are your Facebook friends.

5) Arrange to split the bill for beverages like alcohol and soft drinks, again sibling team effort. Remember to go light on alcohol because, like the recent Houston explosion caused by hurricane flooding, alcohol can detonate sibling warfare.

6) Share jobs- setting up tables, bringing in equipment for sports or games, lawn chairs- especially ‘manning” the barbecue. (Sisters can cook too) Share it and don’t let anyone be top dog –be the chosen chef, unless everyone is fine with that.This is again modeling a sibling team about helping an aging Mom and Dad.

6) It is a party, not a sibling family meeting. If you want to talk about personal issues, make a date in the future to get together with your angry sister/brother.

7) Don’t make this a family meeting where old sibling grudges get hashed out.It is a holiday.

Check out the chapter ” Working With Adult Aging Siblings” by Cathy Cress and Kali C Peterson in  Care Manager’s Working With the Aging Family – for a deeper dive into how to work with midlife siblings around aging parent care. 

Also, you could apply this to any labor day gathering with siblings and just leave out the aging parent issue.

HAVE HAPPY LABOR DAY

Dear President Obama

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Dear President Obama,
I bet you forgot me. Well, I almost forgot you. A few years ago I broke up with you over the public option-. Then I decided to take you back then well you know how girls are being a Dad of teenage girls.

Plus you changed. You got yourself locked up in Washington. That “yes we can” and “change we can believe in “ was gone you weren’t changing anything I could see in spite of all those campaign promises. Like Michele said once -your cute- but not that cute.

But something hit me again – It was health care. I wanted it to change and finally – you did too. And damn if suddenly you weren’t sounding again like your old self, pounding the streets/aka runways with air force one, making stump speeches from your big shiny plane and demanding people back health reform with that fiery passionate old “yes we can” self- I well -I fell in love with.

I love that community organizer in you and he came out again loud and clear.
You did it. You came out strong for what you believed in and let yourself out of that drafty old White House and stumped for change and you passed the health reform bill.

 

But then you sounded like your bad old self again. No:” yes we can” and not confronting immigration before the election. Then your party lost big time and the old yes we can actually came back. Then the new ” I will do it ” poured out. You passed those executive actions on Cuba, immigration and you proved we can and if not ” I will”.

Then you proposed free tuition for community colleges, capitol gains increase to chip away at that greedy 1% and fight for the middle class. Your approval rating skyrocketed up to 50% from an all time low.

 

You have created change I can believe in-

 I’m on your side and you are on mine- or well the people’ side again. I’ll give you a 100% rating and good luck tonight.

Keep up the really great work.

 

 

Memorial Day- Delay in VA Pensions & More Suicide-

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Happy Memorial Day weekend. 350 active troops committed suicide in 2012 . Like President Obama said in his speech this week war has its collateral damage. But it’s not only drones. It’s suicide.

For years I had no conscience about the military or vets. I hated the Vietnam War. Like many kids of the 60’s I despised the draft and needless slaughter. But I never put two and two together and thought of honoring vets and those in the military till I saw the Vietnam memorial.

The black stone stunned me the night I went ,the dead listed by their death rather than alphabetically made me see it as an altar. It was a slab to the scar the Vietnam War where people left flowers, pictures, and heels from proms. I helped create that scar by not honoring the living or dead.

They were in my family and me- a different war- many different wars.. I’ve changed. I still hate why we went to war, go to war. killed  and continue to kill so many people but I don’t hate the men and women that served or who continue to serve.

Instead of a barbecue, I now think of as my cousin who served in Viet Nam’s Phoenix Program and could hardly speak of “the horror”In his 60’s .He was like Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness, brilliantly recreated by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocolypse Now

“The horror” hit my Dad and Mom in 1945. Their marriage dissolved but never ended when he came home 89 pounds and mute after World War Two. It follows me to this day and in many ways killed my brother.My dad was a POW in Germany’s Stalag 17 during World War II, when I was born.  My mother, brother, and I suffered along with him for over 50 years due to the devastation wreaked on his mind. 

I pay tribute to my paternal grandfather felled by sunstroke in World War One . He was operated on by an army doctor who had no idea how to do spinals. My grandfather was declared legally insane all his life. His pension was kept by a bank in Philadelphia because  my grandmother had a 4th grade education. My maternal grandfather had shrapnel in his head  from WW I and for 50 years  was also permanently disabled . In spite of the metal in his brain, he got no promised bonus. He took my mother and his family to protest with the Bonus Army in Washington, where my grandparents and 12 year old mother’s tent was burned to the ground by Eisenhower on his horse.

I would also like to dedicate my blog to all the families of suicide in the military with veterans of World War II, the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, the Gulf War, the war in Iraq and the present war in Afghanistan-whose wholeness was shattered- is shattered- by mental and physical combat wounds. Those Iraq war victims might be haunted by specters in the future that visit adult kids like me.


As a staggering 45 % of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for disability and it takes them a year or more to get it, if they don’t kill themselves first,the Bonus Army’s cause of 100 years ago lives on today.

I hope they don’t wait the 10 years it took my father to get disability, when I finally got him to apply at 65.

Think about all this as you celebrate.

Happy Memorial Day Harry V Cress . He is pictured above on his 85th birthday, the year he died.

 

Grandmother’s , Single Mom’s and Becoming President- Watch for Julian Castro

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Mayor Julian Castro gave the keynote speech at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday. The fascinating fact about him is he has a twin sibling Joaquin. They were raised by a single Mom from the time they were eight. Although the siblings lived in a hardscrabble neighborhood, she was a tough love diligent Mom who saw the value of education. The twin siblings went through high school in three years, to Stanford and then Harvard. The year they graduated from Stanford the mom made $20,000 a year and they made it through school on student loans.Both twin siblings sat next to First Lady Michele Obama at the convention.

 

The twin siblings Mom Rosie were an organizer for Mexican Americans and as a single Mom raised the twin siblings with the help of her mother, their grandmother, Victoria. The twin sibling’s grandmother came from Mexico. As a child, she went to 4th grade and worked as a maid. This extended family, the mother and grandmother instilled drive, ambition and discipline into these twin siblings.

 

Their story is not far from President Barack Obama, who speaks tonight. A single Mom and his grandmother raised him. This extended family, the grandmother and grandfather had a life defining effecton Obama , again giving him drive , ambition and a high sense of family support ,that he has spoken about throughout his presidency.

 

Extraordinarily, a single Mom also parented President Bill Clinton who spoke at the Democratic Convention last night. His grandparents too raised him, in his early years while his Mom went to nursing school after the death of Clinton’s Dad

 

Extended family is critically important in raising any number of siblings in supporting frantically busy, overloaded mothers and dads but especially single Mom’s, who struggle so deeply. Extended family comes in to do what a Mom can’t do, as we can see in the Castro twins, Obama, and Clinton’s case. The result in Clinton and Obama case was with the help of their extended family and grandmother’s is they became President. Who knows what will happen with Juan Castro or his brother Julian

 

 

 

To find out the critical importance of extended family in raising siblings for Generation X today

 

 

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