Cynthia Dearborn nearly unravelled as she took care of the father she'd feared. This is how she coped
/In 2007, Cynthia Dearborn was given just over a week to uproot her life.
At home in Sydney, she received a call from Seattle, where she'd once lived, and where her father, Russell, and stepmother, Beth, still did.
Beth was phoning to say she'd decided to leave Russell and move out of the home in the US they'd shared for the past 30 years.
Russell lived with dementia and required vigilant supervision. On a previous visit, Cynthia had found him outside his home standing on a busy road and refusing to move.
"He wasn't able to make decisions that would keep himself safe, and he certainly wasn't capable of living on his own," the writer and academic tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
But Beth was suffering her own ill health and her 75-year-old husband's condition had become too much for her to manage.
"She was moving out in nine days," Cynthia says.
"My dad would be left on his own. So I then had to figure out what to do."
Geography was not the only complicating factor. Russell was a difficult man. He'd been abusive and violent.
For much of her life, Cynthia had feared her father.
"Now, suddenly, he was going to be my charge," she says.
'I will leave him to you'
Cynthia's response to Beth's unexpected call came almost without thinking. "I knew immediately that I would be going," she says.
"My stepmother said, 'I will leave him to you' and I said, 'Yes, yes, of course'."
"He was so vulnerable," says Cynthia, who has written about her experience in her memoir, The Year My Family Unravelled.
But Russell hadn't always been a vulnerable figure in her life.
As a small child, Cynthia's relationship with him was "fun and affectionate", but from about the age of four, she remembers problems.
"We had a difficult relationship in my childhood," she says.
At home, Russell was abusive to both Cynthia and her mother. It was a "very volatile household", she says.
"He would erupt in bursts of rage at any given moment.
"I was very, very fond of my dad and also scared of him."
'You are not my daughter'
As an only child, Cynthia had another motivation to drop her established life in Sydney and devote most of the following year to caring for her father.
Russell and Beth were effectively her only family.
"When I was 23 years old, I came out as a lesbian and when I told my [biological] mother, she disowned me," Cynthia says.
"And she refused to speak to me on the phone or to see me … for 27 years."
Cynthia didn't have close relationships with most of her extended family because, while she was growing up, she and her parents moved around the world with her father's military job.
"So my family was my mum and dad, and then my mother cutting me off at 23 meant I had my dad and his wife," she says.
"Even though he had been very inappropriate and violent when I was a kid, he had actually been there for me through my 20s and 30s [and] 40s; whereas, my mother wouldn't even take my calls.
"[It's] one reason my father was so important to me."
Listening to 'what I need'
Since Cynthia had moved to Australia in the mid-1990s, she and her father had developed a "workable, doable" and even "enjoyable pattern" in their relationship.
"We were in each other's lives," she says.
"There was a lot of fondness. And we did have regular phone calls and regular visits where I'd go back overseas, so … I was connected to him."
Nonetheless, returning to care for Russell in Seattle was incredibly tough.
His illness was such that he had "no awareness that he was in trouble and in need of care", Cynthia says.
"He actually actively fought care. And he was angry with me for being there, for trying to help him."
Familiar fear reared its head again.
Between the present-day challenges were past issues that surfaced around her. There were "things that he and I had never talked about or processed in any way", she says.
"It was really very difficult, emotionally … I started unravelling, in a way. It was a very, very tough time."
Cynthia had the support of her partner back home in Sydney and old friends in the US who stepped in to help where they could.
"All of those small gestures from other people meant an awful lot because, primarily, I was on my own with this," she says.
But Cynthia — who says she had grown up "externally focused … and [in] an almost emotional caregiver role" for her parents — had another resource to lean on, too.
"As a kid who was in a fairly dysfunctional, abusive-type household, I was very focused on my parents; on what they needed, on what they felt. You get really sensitive to [whether] an explosion [is] about to happen, to the shifting moods."
She'd worked hard to unlearn that.
"The journey of my life has been having to focus on myself; having to get in tune with, what do I feel? What do I want? What do I need?"
In a difficult, isolating situation, Cynthia drew strength from her ability to listen to the "great washes of feeling" she was experiencing and make space to sit with them.
"What helped me the most was just letting myself feel all the feelings that I was having," she says.
"And just hanging in [there]."
A space for 'beautiful, tender moments'
Eventually she found an aged care home for her father and convinced him to move into it. As she was preparing to return home to Sydney, she noticed an unexpected impact on him.
Russell, who was a typically anxious and worried person, had vehemently resisted leaving his home. Yet, in supported accommodation, "he seemed to enjoy life a lot more", she says.
"He actually seemed to relax … so we were able to kind of enjoy each other's company, and without all of the fraught-ness that had always been there. So it was quite a gift, in a way, in the end. We had many beautiful, tender moments together."
Cynthia says these moments don't gloss over the more difficult ones, but they coexist alongside them.
"I don't really relate to 'forgiveness'. My parents made some big mistakes … and they also did some great and wonderful things as parents.
"Relationships are complex [and] full of functionings and dysfunctionings," she says.
"The truth of our lives", she says, "is a mix".
"Especially with family relationships."
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