How My Family Dynamic Is Affected By Parkinson's

Yesterday my dad called and decided he found another project. He wants to look into changing the cell phone plan to find something cheaper. Being the person who oversees the bills, I already know we have the cheapest for what we get. I hang up and my sister asks what he wanted. I tell her, “It’s nothing”. Meanwhile, I do feel a bit stressed on the inside that my dad might actually fight us on this because once he’s got an idea in his head, there’s nothing changing his mind.

Family dynamics & Parkinson's

Being the eldest daughter of an immigrant, Indian household, my sister doesn’t have the best relationship with my father. She is an incredible daughter and he is a great father, but they stress each other out.

At the end of the day, my sister takes care of my parent’s financial needs and engages as much as she can. I would say before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease (PD), she would engage and try to understand what he was doing as we all would.

We would try and solve his problems. If he had money issues, we would solve them. If he had health issues, we were the first ones asking what could we do to figure this out. Now, because of his PD and his retirement, he tends to be impulsive or even obsessive over certain things that we cannot control.

Relating to my loved one with Parkinson's

This change in his behavior, of his mind, only led us down a path of understanding how we, as his children, cannot solve all his problems for him.

He wants to find a new cell phone plan, let him. He will find out the same thing we already know - that we have the best and cheapest plan. He wants to see if there’s cheaper auto loans out there - fine. He’s not going to be able to follow through and actually sign on any dotted lines.

But it goes even deeper with PD. There is so much about how a loved one suffers from PD that cannot be solved. Even the world’s brightest scientists have yet to do it, what is one very loving family going to figure out?

Accepting the things we cannot change

Being Muslim, we believe God has a plan for us. We used to think a lot about why He might put our father through this? What was the wisdom behind it? It made life so very difficult, not for just him, but for all of us.

How easy would it be if my father could drive himself places? He could still budget and manage the finances for his family? That he could work? But we realized asking those questions only made it harder to accept reality.

The reality was that he couldn’t do any of those things anymore. And the solution for it all isn’t in our hands. We read a lot about how PD patients deal with loss of happiness or motivation - the will to try. But where does that leave their family members? How hard it is to watch a loved one fall deeper into their illness.

Accepting that we cannot solve my father’s illness, that we are not the reason he might be in a bad mood one day, has been the biggest change to our family dynamic.

We lived life for a long time looking for ways to make his life easier and simpler. PD came into our lives and showed us, we can’t do that for someone. There are some things that are just simply out of our hands. People with PD and caregivers understand that better than anyone.