Furore and Frenzy

I’ll admit from the beginning that my generations have always been a bit…off. I was born to parents in their mid-40’s. I have siblings 20 years older than I am. I was the youngest member of an entire generation in my extended family. This also means that my father began drawing social security when I was in high school and that when I was in my early 20’s I was faced with the beginning of the first of several health crises in my parents lives. They began to compose wills and do not resuscitate orders and discuss whether it was to their advantage to rid themselves of their property now before they needed to finance elder care.

In my 20’s I was freshly married, trying to figure out what my career was going to be, and horribly naive about the ways that the world actually worked. I was beginning a family of my own and trying to figure out infant care and toddler tantrums.

I was not prepared to care for my parents too. I didn’t feel ready.

The New York Times has just began a regular feature blog titled The New Old Age Blog. It addresses the realities of caring for elderly parents and challenges that individuals are facing during the process.

I do admit that I found the comments section rather amusing. While most of the comments were from thankful individuals in similar situations, there was more than one comment from people that said they planned to share the link to the blog with their parents to spark conversation. They then would list their parents as being ‘old’ and in their 50’s or 60’s.

50 or 60 years old is NOT elderly. A 60 year old person may be considered a senior, but they are DEFINITELY not ELDERLY. In my mind elderly is someone in their 80’s-90’s, and even then I’ve certainly met some in that age bracket that were anything but feeble. Elderly was sometimes the last word on my mind.

I laughed out loud at these people, many of them in their 20’s, with parents only in their 50’s, bemoaning the fact that they would have to care for their parents and it would be horribly inconvenient.

I’m sure their parents found it horribly inconvenient as well to wipe THEIR behinds in infancy. There’s nothing convenient about it. It’s not meant to be convenient, no one ever said it would be.

One girl said it wasn’t fair because her mother takes horrible care of herself by being overweight, smoking etc and she didn’t think it was right that she was going to have to take care of her mother’s health issues later on just because she was irresponsible. I cringed a little bit after reading that because the commenter sounded like she was still a child herself when she started the phrase “It’s not fair.”

Life isn’t fair. Aging, illness, death and dying are not fair things. They’re just part of life. I don’t think any of us have the credentials to determine which cases are fair or not. Some are unfortunate, yes, this is true. They may even be untimely, but never unfair.

I think this commenter’s mother put in her time when she raised her daughter. I’m sure her daughter never gives a second thought to her mother’s hard work in nurturing her every time she pours a drink, eats some candy, or engages in risky behavior. However, it really could be used as the same argument, only in reverse.

Her comment also made me wonder. As a parent, after nurturing your children through childhood, do you cringe every time YOU see your child do something unhealthy? Whether it’s smoke, drink, or utilize poor eating habits do you stop and think, “Gee, glad I bothered pouring healthy food into you, so that you could eat that junk.”

That’s part of what’s so unnerving about the entire aging process. While you’re dealing with one part of the process you have so many unanswered questions about the rest. It doesn’t matter where in the process you are, that’s always the case. So while I contemplate how to help my own parents, I’m still trying to figure out what this whole parenting thing is all about and whether I’m doing it right in the first place.

And someday my kids will do the same for me.

That scares me more….