Welcome To Balancing Work & Aging Parents
The doctor asked to see us both. Not just my husband. Both of us.
I remember that exact phrasing because it is the moment everything shifted. I had spent twenty years inside senior living, sitting across from families on the worst day of their lives, always on the side of the table that knew what to say next.
Then my husband was diagnosed with bladder cancer. My son was ten. I was suddenly on the other side of that table with no idea how to be the person receiving the news instead of the one guiding someone through it.
What followed was not one hard season. It was managing his treatment, my son’s normal childhood, and a career I had spent two decades building, all at the same time, all without anyone at work fully seeing any of it. I sat in the school pickup line running treatment timelines in my head. I answered emails from hospital waiting rooms because work does not pause for a diagnosis. I was passed over for a VP position I had earned. I could have pushed back. I didn’t. He needed me more than I needed the title.
He passed away, and I became a single parent to our son.
Two years later, before I had fully found my footing again, my father had a massive stroke. My mother and I faced the hardest decision fast, rehab was no longer an option, and it was time for hospice. Another VP opportunity came and went. Travel again. This time I didn’t even consider fighting it. My father passed away too.
Most people writing about aging parents come at it from one angle only, the family angle, the caregiving angle, the emotional angle. I write from the place where work and family collide, because that is the place I actually lived, twice, and it is the place almost nothing is written for.
What Balancing Work and Aging Parents Is
This is a newsletter for professional women managing careers while their parents get older, written for the stage before anything becomes a crisis. No diagnosis required. No emergency required. Just the quiet accumulation of attention and decisions that starts long before anyone calls it anything.
Each week I write about three places where work and aging parents intersect.
When work gets harder. The focus that breaks mid-meeting. The interruption that costs more than the minutes it took. The performance dip nobody at the office can explain.
When family gets complicated. The responsibility that landed without a conversation. The sibling who is not showing up. The parent who puts you in the middle.
When you start running on empty. The exhaustion a good night’s sleep does not fix. The version of yourself you spent decades becoming, quietly making room for everyone else.
Not crisis management. Not a support group. Language for the stage most professionals are already in, whether they have said so out loud or not.
Ways to be here
Free. The newsletter arrives weekly, one essay focused entirely on the stage you are already in. This is the work, not a preview of it.
Paid, $8 a month or $50 a year. Each month you get one What To Say guide delivered directly to your inbox, the exact language for a specific conversation across work, family, and the moments running on empty. The knowing and the doing are not the same thing. This is the doing.
Founder, $150 a year. Everything in the paid tier, plus a one-on-one conversation with me quarterly. Your specific workplace, your specific family, worked through with someone who has stood exactly where you are standing.
One thing before you go
The hardest part of this stage is not the logistics. It is the avoidance. Most professionals do not put off these conversations because they lack love or commitment. They put them off because they do not have the words yet.
That is a solvable problem. That is what this is for.
With gratitude,
Susan
