MEET THE AUTHOR

Judith R. Smith

Judith R. Smith, PhD, is a clinical social worker and researcher with decades of experience supporting mothers whose adult children are living with mental illness, substance use, or chronic instability. Difficult is the product of that work — grounded in her own research and years of direct clinical practice.

When I began this research, I was in some ways similar to the women I hoped to meet. I was older, the mother of a son on the cusp of adulthood, and a feminist gerontologist interested in family relationships. Having spent most of my early career studying mothers and their young children, I wanted to understand the experience of mothers whose children were adults.

My earlier work explored the needs of young children — first as a psychotherapist, then as a filmmaker, and finally as a PhD researcher. As I aged, I became interested in the mother-child relationship from the older mother’s perspective. What does it feel like to have your adult child living in crisis? Yet a search for professional literature and self-help books turned up very little. Nearly all the resources were geared toward parents of young children, with scant information on how mothers managed their lives alongside the lives of their adult children. Surely being a mother doesn't end when your kids are in their twenties? I knew from my own experience that this wasn't true.

Some of this curiosity came from watching my own mother's lifelong entanglement with her sister, who struggled with depression. As a young child, I was confused by my mother's relentless devotion to her sister, despite my aunt's difficult behavior. It was hard to watch my mother try to balance her commitment to her sister with her own happiness. I wondered if older mothers of adult children with problems were feeling similar conflicts — and I began a research project to find out.

I wanted to use my clinical and research background to understand the relationship between mothers and their older children, and more specifically, how problems in the lives of adult children affect a mother's sense of self as she herself is aging. As far as I could tell, no one was yet talking about these two things together. This book is what I found.