A Balancing Act: Taking Care of You and Taking Care of Your Teen

Both women acknowledge their teens weren’t always as understanding as they might have liked. After all, kids expect their parents to take care of them—not the other way around. And when a teen feels scared or vulnerable, that often translates to lashing out. Nancy’s daughter sometimes fought with her and seemed annoyed to see her mother resting in the middle of the day. “She was so angry. She just didn’t want me to have cancer,” Nancy recalls, noting, “A lot of the time, you have to pretend you’re better than you are, so I did. I tried to be sick when she wasn’t around.”

Helene remembers how tired she was—she needed the kids to pitch in with housework, but thought acting as ill as she felt would be playing the drama card.

“Part of the problem with us parents is we try to shield our kids, and then we wonder why they don’t understand the seriousness of the situation,” she says.

And so, coping with breast cancer was always a balancing act for these moms. They doled out information willingly, but tried to protect their kids and keep life normal for them, too. Nancy couldn’t help her daughter with college applications, but she managed to organize a trip to visit schools near a relative they could stay with. And she accepted her daughter’s avoidance of the topic of mom’s illness at home, even when that meant her teen opted against tagging along for doctor visits and chemotherapy treatments.

“I didn’t need her to come. I just didn’t want her to feel excluded,” Nancy says, explaining she depended on close friends rather than her teen for support during her illness. “I wanted to open every door, but she didn’t have to come through all of them.”

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Issue: October 2007