In 2003, Shirley Roberts’ life started to fall apart.
Her marketing consultancy was booming. Divorced, she had found a new man she loved. But after her father died that year, within three months her mother, Doris, started to decline, and Ms. Roberts, already working six days a week to keep up with her clients’ needs, had to begin travelling from Toronto to Cobourg, Ont., every Sunday to look after her mother’s needs.
Determined to help her mother live independently, Ms. Roberts arrived once to find unopened mail collecting dust, laundry lying in piles on her basement floor, a burnt-out hallway light bulb, expired milk and yogurt cluttering the fridge, and her mother’s blouse covered in tea stains.
“I was trying to keep my clients and hold on to my future husband but she needed help. I was getting really frustrated as I saw she needed more help than I could give,” Ms. Roberts recalls in an interview. “There was tremendous anxiety. I didn’t know how emotional the task of caregiving to a parent can be – you see in their decline your own mortality. I was also failing at this, and I’m a high achiever – I didn’t like to fail.”
Her plight is, of course, becoming more and more common, as many in the baby boomer bulge deal with the final years of their parents’ lives. Indeed, research Ms. Roberts conducted for a book on the issue suggests over three million boomers are caring for an aging adult. For those boomers still working, in particular, it’s an immense work-life balance issue, and Ms. Roberts’ experience may offer some insights on how to improve your own situation.
Initially, Ms. Roberts was struggling alone, a solo firefighter dealing with whatever conflagrations arose. Worse, her mother’s health continued spiralling downwards. After 18 months, she had to enter a retirement home. Then after her mother fell and broke her hip and couldn’t walk or propel her wheelchair – and with dementia taking hold – a nursing home was needed.
“At this point, I desperately needed to find a better approach to caregiving because I was spending as much time putting out fires for Mom as I was consulting. Her quality of life and mine had taken serious nosedives ever since she landed in the hospital, and my caregiving duties would continue to increase as my mother became more dependent on me for her health and well being,” she says.
A graduate of the Ivey School of Business, she fell back on the organizational model and business discipline that had been familiar to her over the years. She formed a company-like approach she dubbed “Doris Inc.” to look after her mother’s needs. At the helm were Ms. Roberts and her brother, a financial consultant in Vancouver, who had been unable to handle the day-to-day caregiving but now could play an important role in overseeing the care that would be provided by three different teams the siblings set up to focus on their mother’s care.
The first group was the “family caregiving team,” which now included her brother, who could cover for her when she needed a vacation.
