People talk a lot about making memories with your children when they’re young. But lately I’ve been thinking about the memories I do NOT want to leave my daughter with.

The experience of aging, and of having aging parents, has changed dramatically in the space of a single generation. Our lifespans are much longer than they once were – but our ‘healthspans’ are not. Caring for aging parents was once a few months or, at most a year or two, at the end of their long full lifetimes. Now, it can go on for years, or even decades.

Anthony and I have spent a number of years now being caregivers for very ill parents in a medical system that is not set up to provide any kind of real support, and still operates under the assumption that the adult child (most often the daughter or daughter in law, if we’re honest) will be able to take an elderly parent into their home and provide unpaid fulltime care. (Because, I guess, everyone has a large barrier free house, unlimited resources, a strong back, and no need to work?)

We have been doing this for so long, and some of it has been so searing, that the reality, feelings and memories of this kind of caregiving have actually obscured my experience of our parents as parents. I can barely recall the mother who sewed me a fancy dress every year for Christmas; the father-in-law who brought me my favorite cookies every time he visited when I was pregnant. But I sure can recall having to fight with hospital staff to make them understand my parent lives alone when doing discharge planning. I remember the awful feeling that we were drained, exhausted, ill, broke, and in over our heads and nobody gave a shit. They just wanted to check off the box on their discharge forms. I remember giving until I was empty and then being criticized for not doing more or doing it right. Never hearing ‘thank you.’ Waking up in the morning and thinking that if I never saw another day, it would be a relief. (Therapy and medication are the reasons I’m not there still.)

The impact this has had on our family, Anthony’s sibling’s family, and our collective health and wellbeing can’t be overstated. And I know for sure I don’t want memories like these to overwrite Adri’s experience of us as her parents. This is what we’re doing to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Actually admitting that one day we might not be able to care for ourselves. This seems to have been the hardest step for our parents, and it’s the one that kept them from doing the planning that might have spared them, and us, the worst of it. Not because they were clueless assholes; this generational shift came as a surprise to them too. Based on their experience with their own parents, they had no idea they could outlive their health by so long. We have the benefit of that knowledge, so we are planning for old age, including the possibility that we may need help at the end of our lives – and we’re planning like our kid is not part of the picture. First, because you never know; but mostly, because this is the way we ensure that the things we have experienced with our aging parents don’t happen to her. Everyone is responsible for taking care of themselves; even when you’re old, and even when you have kids.

Buying long term care and life insurance. NOW. Medicare does not pay for nursing homes or long term in-home care, folks. Does. Not. Pay. So if you don’t have some other way to pay for it, you will be forced to spend every penny you’ve accumulated in this lifetime on your care (that includes draining your retirement accounts and impoverishing your spouse if you’re married) until you’re destitute and qualify for Medicaid. And Medicaid nursing homes are usually not easily mistaken for the Ritz. Long term care insurance is relatively cheap and easy to get; it protects our assets AND ensures that, should we need care, we have a choice about who provides it and where. We can use that coverage for care in our home, where if we relied on Medicaid, we may be forced to be in a facility. As for life insurance, we used an online calculator to find out how much we’d need for our family to maintain our current standard of living if one of us died. We’ve found term insurance to be the most affordable option, and ours includes a clause that we can access those funds early in the event of a terminal diagnosis.

Funding retirement before college. If your parents were able to pay for your education, good on you, and on them. But that was not our story – we are still paying off student debt, and college is a LOT cheaper than end of life care, so we fund our retirement and insurance before we fund her college. You can’t get a loan or a scholarship for assisted living. She can thank us later.

Being nice to the spouse-in-law. OK, we’re not here yet, but it’s our plan. Unless we die suddenly, despite all our planning, it’s likely our kid’s spouse is going to have some kind of impact on our old-age care, and vice-versa. So our plan is to not be assholes to this person. (Closely related: expressing kindness and gratitude for anything Adri or her spouse do for us.)

Communicating our expectations to our kid. Even now we tell her that we do not want or expect her to be the one who cares for us in our old age – that we are planning and insuring ourselves for that need. Granted, everyone is going to be in a different place on this, especially if they haven’t had the experiences we have. But we want her to be nothing but our beloved child, right up until the end. We want to be free to continue to enjoy each other, without her feeling responsibility for our care. It’s also a privacy and dignity issue for me; if I can’t dress and toilet myself, I’d rather it be done by someone I’m paying to do it, than by my husband or child.

We are still in the thick of it, sandwiched firmly between the needs of our aging parents and those of our young child, so there may be more added to the list before we’re through. How do we cope? That’s another conversation entirely.

Every time I’ve seen my doctor for the last four years, she’s asked me if I’m ready to give up sugar, alcohol, and caffeine. Usually, I laugh. I mean, I’ve seen the articles that recommend giving these up to improve PMS, perimenopause, and menopause symptoms; they’re everywhere. But the advice was so ubiquitous it always irritated me – like telling depressed people to get more physical activity. It felt like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic: no, this is BAD, stop talking to me about vegetables.

But this spring, Anthony and I read this article in the UK magazine The Guardian. It tracks the research on cardiovascular disease and obesity from the 1950s and lays out step by step how research was cherry-picked to make fat the bad actor in these conditions – and how some of the same researchers who were bribed to do this ended up in the highest levels of authority on nutrition in the US, and based our dietary guidelines on that faulty research. It’s a conspiracy worthy of Big Tobacco.

And then we read the book Fat Chance, by endocrinologist Robert Lustig. This book is mentioned in the Guardian article and carefully lays out exactly what sugar does to your body.  No, you’re not safe if you’re skinny, and yes, it’s terrifying. It explains how and why sugar is now in every-fucking-thing that you don’t make yourself, so we’re getting loads more of it than we even know. And how our (screwed up) metabolisms actually drive our behavior – until it’s no longer a matter of choice. That last part was important to me; it removes the shadow of judgment from people who are struggling with weight or health.

Both our families are rife with metabolic disease, and we are watching some beloved people battle through its final stages. It’s ugly and awful; you don’t just die, you spend years in misery (along with your family) and then you die. So we just….quit. We stopped drinking soda, mostly stopped eating sweet stuff. We looked at what we ate that was processed and contained sugar (spaghetti sauce, bread, yogurt, cereal, frozen meals) and, if we really liked it, found lower-sugar alternatives or made homemade versions without sugar. But that’s all we did. We didn’t go crazy; I eat dark chocolate almost every day. We still have some kind of treat or dessert about once a week, we just do it intentionally instead of mindlessly after every meal. Pizza still finds its way into our house about once every week too. And we didn’t address (yet) the quality of our other carbohydrates – we still ate white bread, white rice, pasta.

So what happened?

Anthony happened. I mean, he HAPPENED. Doing nothing else but avoiding sugar, he lost about ten pounds but looks like he lost more. A few weeks ago I came across a photo of him from a year before we gave up the white stuff. I was shocked; right now he looks ten years younger than he did in that photo. He’s sleek and glowing and annoyingly energetic, and it happened to him fast – by the end of the second month.

I complained to Anthony that I wasn’t seeing any visible changes (dammit, I want to be sleek and glowing and annoyingly energetic!). He blurted out, “Oh my God, your moods are so much better when you don’t eat sugar.” And then looked like a deer in headlights. (Fortunately for him, he said this to post-sugar me, so he lived to tell the tale. Poor man.)

At my annual physical, when I had been at this a little over three months, I weighed in about four pounds lighter than I was a year ago (my weight was within normal limits when I started), and all of it seemed to have come off my midsection. My cholesterol had dropped to 162. And the perimenopausal breast pain that was no longer controlled by medication and would wake me up in the night for two solid weeks every month, was gone. (Premenstrual bitchiness still solidly intact though; I guess one can’t have everything.)

Are we imposing this on our kid? Oh hells no. Primarily because we’ve always just offered what we thought were reasonable food choices and let her make the decisions on what and how much. But also because she’s an adolescent, and demonizing or forbidding sugar would pretty much guarantee she’d be shotgunning Mountain Dew every time she was out of our sight. I figure her sugar consumption is being reduced simply because there’s less of it in the food we eat at home, which is something. And, fortunately for us, she’s an adventurous kid who loves to cook and try new things, so she’s getting interested herself in finding new recipes and new ways of eating things we love.

I admit, part of me is pissed that the benefits were so clear. I kind of wanted it to be bullshit so I could just go back to eating the way I did before. To believing I was doing pretty well, and that if I’m not significantly overweight I must be healthy. But the farther in I am, the less I want to go back. I was surprised at how relatively easily this has become a way of life. I still have days where I crave sugar (especially after I’ve just had some – a little seems to turn on the switch and I want more), but really only the first few days were difficult. I take L-Glutamine as needed; it usually makes a sugar craving go away in about ten minutes.

My doc is thrilled and a little smug. But she better keep her hands off my coffee and wine.