Ep48: What Caregiving, Grief, and Generational Healing Taught Me About Parenting

Hi, I'm Ashley Chandler, here to guide you to the soul-to-system support you both need to thrive from the inside out. This is The Teenage Guide Podcast. Hi there, pull up a chair. Come join me. Come join me over here on this side of podcast land. Welcome back to The Teenage Guide Podcast. So before I dive in, I, for the last few weeks, I've been sharing how In mid-April, I ran what I called the May Reset, which is a workshop and a bundle for parents who are looking to get some time and energy back, who are looking for more connection, who are looking to actually have more presence and peace during this extremely busy season. Hello, graduates. I have several grad parties just this weekend, so I know how busy this time of year gets. This workshop and bundle is so value-packed. It's a little over an hour and it's going to give you so much time and energy back. So I'm going to share details with you at the end all about that. So make sure you stick around. So today's episode is a little bit different in that I'm going to be sharing something pretty personal, but at the same time that it's personal to me, I genuinely feel like it helps so many parents during this season of life. Something that really differentiates me from, I think, a lot of what we hear in parent coaching specifically with teenagers is calling the elephant out of the room, which is that midlife you are going through basically reverse adolescence and being sandwiched, which being called the sandwich generation is nothing new, but being sandwiched between aging parents And teenagers is a particularly unique and often stressful time of life. And so by sharing my story, I hope that I can elevate and inspire and validate any of you and your experience if you're going through the same thing. Ultimately, I hope that it gives you permission to be more honest, And compassionate with yourself, because that is the foundation of everything else that you want in your life, in parenting, in being a human being, and in your life parenting your unique teenager and parenting this season of life. The more patience, the more peace, the more compassion you have with yourself ripples into everything else in your life in a positive way. So if you're listening to this podcast, chances are likely that you are in midlife, you do have younger kids or teenagers or young adults or all 3, that you are in your potentially late 30s, 40s, definitely 50s likely, and maybe even 60s, and that you are faced with the possibility of your parents or your caregivers aging and what that means for you. And the trickle-down effect for your whole family. And just as like your teenager's needs are shifting, right? They're developing their own identity. You want them to have more independence. You wanna be able to have influence and connection and make sure that they are building the right skills that enabled them to fly and reach their dreams, et cetera, et cetera, and make good decisions, right? Your needs are also shifting. And your parents' needs are also shifting. Everyone's needs are shifting at the same time. And there you are in the middle of it, trying to hold all of it. So for me, being in that sandwiched place came with the responsibility of caregiving. I am an only child. My mom was not married. She did not have anyone else. And so the responsibility was on me to ensure that her final years She was taken care of as much as possible. And being a caregiver asks of you, it asked of me, nothing like I had ever experienced before. It wasn't like being the mother of a newborn or a toddler, which was also an intense period. It wasn't like I was just trying to work towards something. It stretched me in ways that were extremely humbling and made me really get clear and honest about the relationship that I had with myself. I thought I had learned those lessons before, but this was the ultimate way that I had to learn these lessons. So this journey today and today's podcast is what happened to me. what happened for me, I shall say. And I want to walk you through it. So if you knew my mom, you knew that she was a force of nature. She, I like to say, spoke fluent Texan and football. She was a teacher, much to my chagrin, in absolutely everything, whether I wanted to learn it or not. But then at the same time, she was a beloved teacher from kindergarten through the college years. She was a force of nature, very strong personality, and modeled pulling herself up by the bootstraps, hustling, working 4 jobs at one time, single mom. She really modeled overcoming a lot of things and having that positive attitude and, I can make this happen. She did everything that she could to make sure the lights stayed I stayed on. There was food in the fridge. And I think at the end of the day, she knew that she loved me to the best of her ability. I watched her do things that most people would not have the endurance for. I can now see it through a different light, but let me tell you, it was a lot of hustle, a lot of grind, a lot of getting paid peanuts. And a lot of evolution. She was also, and I say this with all the love in my heart, but I'm just going to be really honest. She was also really hard to be around sometimes. When she was at her worst, I walked on eggshells and this continued all the way through until the last day. Sometimes my emotions were too much for her. She probably heard me say this before, but she would say everything was great until you were a teenager. So up until I was a teenager, it's like being a little kid made sense to her. She was so good with little kids and she could handle it and she never made me feel bad or ashamed. She was always there for me when I was younger. Once I reached the teenage years and that behavior started showing up differently, those emotions started showing up differently, pushing her away, resisting, et cetera. She made it my fault and my problem. And our dynamic completely shifted to if I was moody or if I had a feeling about something, or if I was resisting her, if I didn't want to be taught to again, she would lash out or snap. If I was just trying to help, even through adult years, sometimes she would receive it and be so appreciative. And then other times she played victim. The best way I can describe it is that I walked on eggshells with her a lot. Her behavior, her reactions became very, very unpredictable. And I never knew who I was really going to get. So I learned very early on that the way to be safe was to act in a way that could help manage her feelings and her experience. And that played out into lots of different relationships in my life. I want people to be happy. I want to keep the peace. I'm going to put my needs to the side. I don't even know what my needs are so that I'm safe, so that I can keep the peace, so that everyone would be. And of course, I didn't have the language for this when I was young. No one does. We think it's our fault. We think it's about us. It's not. But at the time, I didn't know that. And as I've gotten older, I've learned. that that is codependency. Codependency is the definition that I love is you check the temperature of the room and everyone in that room, and then you decide how you're going to show up. And those patterns would follow me for decades. And they were with me until a handful of years ago. They would show up in sneaky ways, the codependency, the people pleasing. And the hustling that I see now, if she were alive today and she would be listening to this, she would be sad that that's what I got from her. It's not the only thing I got from her, obviously, but we inherit these patterns in these ways, this conditioning from our childhood, from our parents, from our upbringing, from our environment, from our caregivers. And it wasn't that she gave me these patterns. Out of cruelty. She gave them to me unconsciously because she was running those patterns on her own. She learned those patterns from somewhere too, and she was doing the best she could with what she had. And that's how it works. We inherit unhealed things from generations in the past until we have the courage to be really honest about them, face them for what they are, and heal them in this generation. When people talk about healing generational trauma, This is what they are referring to. And so for me, I thought I had been through numerous things in my past and I thought I learned all of those things. I really did several times. It's like the classic, like the brick wall shows up, then the freight train shows up until you get the lesson. Well, this was like the anvil on my head lesson that I called in. I welcomed it in. I asked her to live close and it was as if the universe was saying, Sure. Here you go. This is the final lesson that you need to learn in order to heal these patterns that you think you've learned. You think you have, but this is your opportunity. And that opportunity cracked me wide open and it lasted for the 4 years that I was her caregiver. And then it's like A whole new person in me has emerged in the last 6 months since she passed. It's like these parts of me died when she died. So about 14 years ago, my mom was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is a blood and bone cancer, and it's incurable, but it's treatable. And it often acts as like a chronic illness versus a really intense Cancer. She didn't lose her hair. She had targeted treatments. She did have chemo, all the things. Um, but it, but it was a different journey. It was a different kind of journey. So we knew the disease would progress. She ultimately wouldn't die so much of the cancer as much as the effects that having blood and bone cancer would have on her organs and her systems and everything else in her body. So when she needed support, when she was alone, Living by herself and couldn't take herself to a doctor's appointment, that meant me. And it felt like at the time, it felt like I want to do that. We're in a peaceful place. Lots of stuff has healed. I had these kind of rose-colored glasses inviting her into my personal space where I live. And that's a whole other story, but I welcomed her here. Classic Ashley pattern. I'm going to make it better. I'm going to be the one that takes care of her until the end. And it's going to be this beautiful journey where we're so connected until the very end. And I'm going to be the one that helps make her final days extremely positive and loving. And for the first month, it felt like that. It felt like, wow, here we are. Everything's great. And then the reality showed up. And I won't go into all the layers of the reality, but I will say that stuff hit the fan in a way that was completely unexpected, unplanned, like you couldn't write this stuff. So I found myself in this unique situation where now she's living with us. I haven't lived with this woman for 18 years and now she's living with us without being in her creature comforts. Meanwhile, I'm running a business. I'm coaching families. It's right after COVID. And so there was a lot happening there. I'm a parent of a tween and a teen myself, right? You can see the layers and the complexity in this. It wasn't just like, let's wrap it up in a pretty bow. It was life. Life was lifing big time right over here. And meanwhile, I had my mom who I had a history of having a rollercoaster relationship with, Now living with us. I realized over time and through those layers, I wasn't just caring for a person who needed caretaking. It wasn't just as neutral as that. I was caring for the person who arguably gave me some of my deepest wounds and all of those old dynamics. The walking on the eggshells, the hustling, the people-pleasing, the trying to make everyone happy, the kind of shrinking of myself so that I could keep the peace, it all came back to the surface. But now I could see it in a way that I had never seen it before because they came back with a force that I didn't expect. And it came back reflected in my own kids. Eyes, in their own experiences, as if they were experiencing it now. And I would've never wanted that for them. When it happened to them, I was able to see that little kid in me and I was able to see, nope, the pattern will stop right here. And I had to do the work that it required, not because I thought I was ever going to fix her, I realized it was like grieving her while she was still alive, but that I was going to heal me and future generations, that these patterns would not be passed down to my kids. And I did that work through exactly what I share with you in this podcast and with my clients and inside my programs every day. I did it through the 3 selves. I did it through my own self-awareness practice. I did it through my own spiritual practices. I did it through my own self-regulation, nervous system regulation practice. And I did it through deep self-compassion. I did it through being honest about the skills I had and the skills I didn't have and intentionally building those skills. One example, Boundaries. I realized my boundaries in certain ways were very permeable. I took on stuff that wasn't mine to take on. In the past, that kept me safe, and now it was making me sick. So nothing external changed. My mom was still very much my mom, maybe even more exacerbated because she had a host of other medical things and mental things that would come up, as does with aging. Right? But she was always going to be that. And there was a really intense grieving while she was still alive that was so painful. The illness was still the illness. The behavior was still the behavior, if not worse. But what changed was me. My ability to preserve my own peace, my ability to put myself Truly first, my ability in the moment of being triggered to tune in, to speak up, to regulate, to keep myself safe in a way that I knew was healthy, to tell the truth or speak up in a way if I felt like it would serve me, or to not say anything at all if I felt like it wouldn't serve me. To never make my emotions the problem. To look at them as a compass, as a guiding system that shows me what's actively being healed, where I can let go a little, where I can de-stress, where I can ask for help. This is the work that got me through. And she died October 18th, 2025. I was there with her in her final days. That is a story for another time. I will say, That, and it makes me emotional to think about, was one of the most profound gifts of my entire life. I was able to mother myself and mother her without resentment in a way that she had never experienced. And there was truly love and peace in the end. And the reason that was possible is because of the work and the care that I gave myself throughout the entire caregiving journey. And things died in me when she died, old versions of me, patterns. I mean, after she passed, I slept for— 2 years. I'm not exaggerating, like an entire month. Like, it's like I genuinely was flooding cortisol out of my body and catching up. And I felt like I had brain fog. I couldn't— it wasn't that I was sad, as bad as that sounds. It's like I'd been already grieving for years. So by the time she passed, it was like a returning to my true nature and myself. And my soul. And I slept for that first month and I noticed I, all these old patterns were dying. Like I couldn't hustle. I had what I call TILIF energy. T-I-L-I-F is an acronym. I love acronyms that stands for take it or leave it. And the F you can replace with friend. Or you can say faux. I chose to say the other thing. I had no craps to give. Take it or leave it. Nothing to prove. I'm not hustling anymore. I'm not trying to prove anything to you so that you'll like me or validate me. I am checking in with my own energy when I walk into a room, and that's how I show up versus letting the external world dictate how I feel. So these patterns that I had carried with me that kept me safe in the past, that I'd carried with me through childhood, I wanna share them because I wonder if they might help you, if you recognize them in yourself too. Codependency. So I spent my whole life really thinking that my mom's emotions were oftentimes my responsibility, very unconscious. Like if you actually saw us, you would see me disagreeing with her or whatever, But I was always checking her to see how she would react because I needed to keep her safe. My inner state was oftentimes very dependent on her emotional state. And caregiving forced me to face this directly because I could not make her completely okay. I could not fix it no matter how much I worked, no matter how hard I tried. I could not fix her. And what I started realizing is, what if in this lifetime, it was not my responsibility to fix her? What if my responsibility was always to myself? So today I have this inner anchor in honor of my dog Anchor. I have this inner anchor that holds me steady. It sounds cheesy, but I love and appreciate myself more than I ever have. I know how to take care of me. I know myself. I know what I need, and I know that that's gonna be evolving as I evolve. So shifting it to you, if you are waiting for someone else to be okay in order for you to be okay, if you're waiting for your partner to be less stressed, less angry, to be okay, less anxious, if you're waiting for your teenager to have more confidence, less drama, If you're waiting on one of your parents to be okay, and then you'll be okay, that is an opportunity to question it, to look within. If your mood rises and falls depending on the other people in your family, depending on your teenager, that is an invitation to question, am I dependent on other people, other things, my external world To then tell me I'm enough, I'm okay, I'm safe. This is an opportunity to go within. You deserve to feel grounded and balanced, and you are fully capable of this all on your own without waiting for the external world, without waiting for your teenager to tell you, okay, you can feel de-stressed now, Mom, right? They won't be able to do that. In fact, this is a really key Part of emotional regulation when it comes to our relationship with our teenager. They need you to detangle from them. They need you to be the regulated one, and that's how they learn to do the same. So if you notice that you have any tendencies, any conditioning from the past similar to me that was waiting on other people, recognize you have the power. to shift that dynamic within yourself. And it's the gift to your teen. It's a great, huge, massive, priceless gift to them. And that's how they will learn that you are steady enough to hold whatever it is that they've got going on, that nothing fazes you with them, that your steadiness does not depend on them. It's there no matter what. The second thing that died in me that I mentioned already, but it's worth repeating, is hustling. I watched her burn herself into the ground, 4 jobs hustling. She, at one point, the woman was teaching elementary school. She had a column in the newspaper. She was doing a paper route, and she was running a tutoring business. And so this is what I thought was normal. Instead of being paid what I was worth for one job, I watched her work multiple jobs, and then that was enough, right? Feeling very spread thin. Yeah. To make ends meet, coming from scarcity and lack, proving my worth. I don't do that anymore. You work yourself ragged. It's never enough. Maybe it is for a little bit, but ultimately it's not. And you just keep repeating the cycle. But another layer beneath that is about how you feel about yourself. It's about feeling like you aren't worthy of rest because if you rest, Then you're not proving, you're not doing enough. And another layer that could be underneath that too is the idea that it's not safe to rest because when you rest, you get quiet. And when you get quiet, you have to get honest. So we need to keep ourselves busy so we don't have to face the truth. When I was busy, busy, busy, I didn't have to face or feel the things I didn't want to feel. Hustling, being busy was a way of disappearing. And I really learned how to compartmentalize and disappear and numb starting in my teenage years. So through my 20s, once I graduated from college, I had multiple jobs. I did the exact same pattern. I hustled, I grinded. I had a hard time saying no. I tried to make everyone happy. I frequently burned the candle at both ends. And underneath all of that is this belief that A, things need to be hard in order to be worth it. B, I have something to prove. I don't quite deserve it unless I've earned it. And there will never be enough. Scarcity, scarcity, scarcity. So watching my mom go through this program and then her ultimate passing allowed me to see the program for what it was and realize it doesn't make sense anymore. What a gift. It doesn't make sense anymore. In the last year, I've been completely reprogramming my conditioning around all of this. And what I have learned is the opposite of what I thought in the old program. When I rest, I protect my energy. I am more focused. I am more logical. I'm more intuitive and I'm more strategic. In other words, I'm more effective. And I feel more present to my life. I'm showing up better. I'm doing better. I'm stronger in my work. I'm stronger in every area of my life. And I'm more of myself. This is not about achievement or perfection. This is about authenticity. Again, this goes back to the Tea Leaf energy. In this age of AI, I hear a lot about how important authenticity is going to be in the conversation. And that is another thing that I wanna say about what I'm sharing today is you can cut corners with AI and save time and energy for sure. You can go on Amazon and buy something that's gonna help you be more organized, but nothing will shortcut the benefits that you get from going through the challenge. And facing the truth, the patterns, the conditions, the behavior that you have created in your own life. And there is no greater gift that you can give to your teenager at a time when they are trying to make sense of who they are and make sense of the world and where they fit. The third thing that died in me was people pleasing. This is not coming from a conceited, egoic place, but I often felt like I had learned through sometimes my mom's behavior, other people, like I was a very good people observer, people watcher. Pattern recognition is a strength. And so I learned what was appealing to people, how to make people happy. And I do think that there's a light and a dark to all of our gifts, right? So it's not to say that understanding people is a bad thing. It's to say that if you are trying to make everyone happy at the expense of yourself, that's when it's a dark side. That's when people pleasing has a dark side, because I would try to make sure everyone was okay. I would shapeshift. be a chameleon in different environments in order to be the most likable person in any room. So there was a moment years ago where my mom was recently diagnosed with her cancer and this family friend— hi, Cindy, if you ever listen to this, she's truly such a gift in my life, such a blessing. She was a friend of my mom's. She knew my mom very well. And And she was also a friend to me, like a mentor to me. And I had come home and visited her. I was living in California at the time and I had come back to Missouri and visited her. And many of the things that I tried to implement for her initially when she got her diagnosis, like I cleaned every room, I put an air purifier, I set her up with a dietitian, the list goes on. None of those things. It was like her whole house went back to the way that it was before the diagnosis, right? Now I know better, but that was my way of trying to quote unquote help was to set her up with these things, but none of them were maintained. And so I reached out to Cindy because I was so frustrated and it was a real push and pull for me. I just felt at one point I said to My mom, I was pointing to a vent that was covered in dust and dirt. I have cat eyes. I can see like the most random spider on the ceiling that's like 60 feet high. And so I'm seeing this dust and dirt and I was getting really impassioned about it with my mom. And I was saying, you got to take care of yourself. Like, you're breathing that in. It's disgusting, Mom. Like, why are you not prioritizing yourself? I'm on your side. And the irony, I mean, you can hear it in my voice right now that she said, well, it doesn't feel that way. Well, no wonder, right? My approach was way off. So I pulled Cindy to the side and I had a private conversation with her and she had been through family members struggling with alcoholism, ultimately passing. She'd been in Al-Anon, which is the family support arm to AA. And she'd been in that support group for a long time. And one of the things that she shared with me changed my life. And she said, in Al-Anon, when you, someone you love is struggling, the practice of letting go is called lovingly detaching from their choices. And when you lovingly detach from their choices, you enable them to get their power back. Like ultimately, it's not your job to have that relationship, to control that relationship they have with themselves. Or their higher power, if they have one, or their behavior, that's not you. You're trying to control something that is not yours to control. And so that really helped me start to detach and lovingly detach from a lot of my mom's choices. And it helped also put into practice a lot of the tools that I use in terms of Boundaries and practicing the 3 selves and communication tools, et cetera, that I use in relationships and how I coach families and how to have that healthy separation and not try to make everyone happy all the time. It's not yours to take on. Coming back to you and your teenager, you are not responsible for making them happy. You cannot make them happy all the time. You are not supposed to. When you exhaust yourself trying, bending over backwards, sacrificing everything to make them happy, you are actually robbing yourself and them of the experience needed in order to strengthen the relationship with yourself and for them to strengthen their relationship to themselves, their own inner life, their own resilience. Their own becoming of who they are meant to be. Your job is to be the teenage guide. It's to be the stable, regulated, loving presence, to work on yourself, to model what it is to be a whole person, to embody tea leaf energy, to build skills, To go after your dreams, to be accountable, to be there as an anchor for them, a safe place to land, and to ultimately trust that their path is theirs alone. It is their divine path. It is their path to their soul, to their inner guidance system, to Their mind and their body. So here's what I want to leave you with today. I'm not a different person because any circumstance really changed. I am a different person because the relationship I have with myself is completely different. I had to walk through a lot of really hard stuff. And at the time, I even knew, I knew that I had to do it and it was so painful and I still knew I had to do it. And because I did that, I am the strongest version of myself today than I've ever been. Nothing external changed. I changed. When we're faced with a challenge, the invitation is to always go within. What is this bringing up in me? Where can I be more accountable or honest? Where can I take care of myself, prioritize my own needs? Where can I tell the truth? Where can I be kinder to myself? What dysfunction wants to die so that something else can live. And so this is what I wanna offer you today in this episode. Wherever you are in your life right now, whether you're in a caregiving season, whether you are in a really intense parenting season or season in a relationship or within your own self, whatever that midlife moment is that you didn't quite think it would be this way, but here you are, you are not behind. You are not doing it wrong. You are at a critical moment in your life that is inviting you to grow. So the 3 selves that I shared in the Reset Series in these past 3 episodes, the self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-compassion, this is the foundational practice that got me through that I invite you to practice every single day that you can. It is available to you at any time, whatever season of life that you're in. So I trust that this personal story and reflection will support you and help you in some way. And I know that when we share those hard parts of ourselves and our lives, it is permission for others to be honest. And so that's the intention that— and why I share this with you today. Be sure to check out all the details about the May Reset, that live workshop and bundle that's still available throughout May. Be sure to check out the details in that. In the links below and also all the different ways that you can work with me. If you are still struggling to figure out summer support with your teenager, or you are at a critical moment in your life as a parent in midlife, being a caregiver and having the best relationship with your teen, I love, I absolutely love the work that I get to do as the Teenage Guide. Remember, never underestimate the power that you have as the parent. I know you have limited time and energy, so thank you for being here and kudos to you for investing this time in yourself and your team. If you enjoyed this episode, please continue the ripple effect and like, subscribe, review, and/or share with a fellow parent who could benefit so more people can find my content.