When My Sugar Baby Helped Me Care for an Aging Parent

I knew that my sugar baby was an incredibly kind person from our very first interactions. So it didn’t surprise me at all when she told me that she was in grad school getting her master’s in social work. Sugaring, she said, was a way for her to get a head start on the student loans she was going to struggle to pay for on a social worker’s salary. I didn’t really understand the draw of going into a grad program that wasn’t even pretending to offer a good return on investment. But Shauna was pragmatic and scrappy. She would figure out a way to make a living helping people. I liked this girl.

I was happy to take Shauna out to eat as many times during the week as she was available. With her classes and her internship, that was only one or two times a week. I would joke around that it was the least I could do for someone who was carrying the weight of society on her shoulders, but the reality was that I got a lot out of my dates with Shauna. She was literally training to be a good listener. And I had some heavy things that I was dealing with that I was grateful to have someone to bore with. I told her that the only catch was that she wasn’t allowed to make me into a case study for one of her classes.

Quick-witted as she was, she responded with, “Sorry, I’m going to have to leave early. I have an unfinished case file on my computer that I need to delete.”

Shauna was probably diagnosing me during our dates, but she never let on if she was. Not that I would have minded, actually. I had spent many years in therapy, in part to help me work through the aftereffects of growing up with a dad with an alcohol problem.

By the time I met Shauna, my dad had a fatty liver disease diagnosis. He had a live-in nurse who was trying her hardest to prevent him from developing into full-blown cirrhosis. But my dad was a stubborn man. He was going to find a way to drink by any means necessary.

I was getting calls multiple times a week from the nurse complaining about my dad’s bad habits and even worse character. She was threatening to quit, which I completely understood.

In the end, the nurse didn’t quit. My dad fired her. It was after he was officially diagnosed with cirrhosis and the doctor told him the hard facts about his expectancy and what the next few months to years would look like.

“I’m moving in with you,” he told me later on the phone. “We can get another nurse if you want, but I don’t want someone who’s going to badger me all the time. I just want some peace, finally.”

I was furious, and the first person I thought to talk to about it was Shauna. I was expecting that she would give me some kind of pep talk about setting boundaries and moving my dad into a full-time care facility that would keep him healthy for as long as possible.

But she surprised me by taking his side. “This isn’t about the nurse,” she said gently. “Your dad wants to spend whatever time he has left with you. With his son. If you put him somewhere, I wouldn’t blame you. Caring for an ageing parent is a huge responsibility. But you might come to regret it later if you don’t.”

I didn’t want her to be right. But of course, she was. I had an extra bedroom. I, myself, was semi-retired, so I could spend a good amount of time with him. And we would hire a nurse to come help with medications and personal hygiene.

“It’s going to mean that I’m less able to take you out during the week,” I told Shauna. “We’d have to scale back to once every two weeks, realistically.”

“No, no, let’s keep our normal routine. I’ll just come to your place, and we can order in. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Don’t worry about that.”

I think Shauna knew how important our dates were to me.

I was hesitant about having Shauna meet my dad, especially after having spoken so negatively about him to her for so long. If she didn’t secretly have a case file on me, she certainly could have had one on my dad after the stories I told her.

But again, Shauna surprised me. She showed up on move-in day with bagels and coffee. And she and my dad hit it off immediately. She had him in stitches within minutes of meeting him. I mean, it almost made me jealous. Almost.

Anyway, this was all happening at the same time that there was a nursing shortage in the city we were living in. And finding a replacement for the nurse that Dad fired was tough. Either they were inconsistent, or they did something to piss off my dad, and he never got over a grudge.

I ended up relying on Shauna a lot over the next few months. It turns out that before going to grad school, she had worked in an old folks' home, so she was actually really at ease around my dad. She helped me learn how to do basic care tasks and talk my dad through moments of confusion or bad moods.

And, she insisted that when the nurse was there, I go for a walk or out for coffee with her so that we could talk about what I was going through.

At first, this was one of the hardest parts. It’s so much easier to focus on tasks and logistics instead of really taking a hard look at what was happening to my dad.

Sometimes I felt ready to open up to Shauna, and sometimes I was simply too exhausted to do anything other than put one foot in front of the other.

All through this time, Shauna, of course, had her own hectic life to deal with. She was approaching graduation, and that meant that her school workload was more demanding than ever. Not only was she dealing with her caseload, but she was also studying for the licensing exam she would need to take after graduation. Many nights, she would sit up with me with a huge diagnostic book and a highlighter, and I couldn’t believe that she had the energy for everything she was doing.

My father passed away a week before Shauna’s graduation. I won’t share the details here, but I cycled through just about every emotion known to Man. And I refused to let Shauna help me, calling instead on my therapist.

“You have done enough, Shauna,” I told her. “Please, for the love of Pete, focus on yourself for one week, the most important week of your life.”

I’ll admit that I wasn’t in the right place to show up for Shauna for her graduation or her licensing exam. I checked in whenever I could, but I was in an immense fog and dealing with everything that my father had left behind.

In the meantime, Shauna passed her exam and got hired by the agency that she had been talking about since I met her. We finally scheduled a date, three months after I had last seen her.

It was like no time had passed, but at the same time, it had been years since I had seen her. I was finally starting to come out of the fugue state that I had been in, but Shauna reminded me that grief could be a long, loopy process.

“I’ll be here, if you’ll let me,” she said.

I was moved almost to tears (which was admittedly very common for me in those days). I felt so guilty about having retreated over the last few months. I wondered how she had paid for her graduation gown and the licensing fees. When I asked her about it, though, she brushed me off.

“I had some extra free time since you took a step back, so I got a part-time job at a restaurant downtown. You know me: scrappy. I do what I have to.”

The next week, I had a meeting with my accountant and put together a long-term plan for Shauna. After all she had done for me, I was determined to help her pay off her student loans as quickly as possible and put aside some money for whatever she might want in the future. It turns out, she was interested in becoming a clinical social worker and having her own private practice one day.

I can proudly say that I was there the day she opened the door of her new practice. On the wall of her office, she hung a picture of my dad and me.