Mom & Me Two Archive

1. Add email address to templates. Change email address on changed pages.
2. Redo counters.
3. Redo search engine. Add search engines.
4. Add additional link box to Mom & Me One Archive pages.
5. I've recently written Doctors and Patience in my head. I need to find the time to get it on screen.

    Something I've been meaning to mention regarding the Sharing Wisdom Conference:  It has recently come to my attention that over the last several years the city of Phoenix has charged a nominal admission to Women's Expo. Apparently, with chain grocery store discounts, one can get in for $10.00. I wouldn't have minded and could have sprung for $10.00 for a Caregiving Expo on the order of Women's Expo. Samples and goodie bags would be assumed, perhaps not a catered lunch but enough samples to make up for it and reasonably priced fast food stands could dot the perimeter. Certainly someone can eat on the hoof for well under $35.00 at an Expo. As well, free charge care (rather like child care but including all ages and stages of need/dependence) could be offered. I might even consider a nominal fee for this.
    Don't ask me how this is related to the paragraph above, but it is. Adult caregiving is so new and unnerving a service that talking about it is still in the "precious" stage. This is probably the one aspect of the conference that still sticks in my throat. There are so many myths surrounding what I do for my mother that must be exploded, quickly, so that our society can more easily absorb this lifestyle. Yes, it is a lifestyle, sometimes a chosen one, sometimes a coerced one. One of these myths is that this is like taking care of children. It isn't. I suppose there is a case for it being the opposite of taking care of children except that careful attention to the concept of opposites raises the question whether increasing self-reliance is the "opposite" of increasing detachment. As well, the only real relief from this type of caretaking is the death of the cared for. In the case of taking care of children, the death of the cared for is always considered a tragedy when it occurs before that of the caretaker. Too, as caretakers we are "guiding" someone through a stage of life we have not experienced, and may not experience. We have no lightly submerged memories of having been taken care of like this and what it may have been like. Most of us have only a vague notion of what it is like to negotiate life while one's faculties decline. Some of us have no notion of this. We don't know of what our bodies are capable in decline so we don't know what the bodies of our loved ones might do. Hopefully this information will be gathered from us baby boomers for intelligent use by further generations. But none of it is handy at the moment except by way of anecdotes which usually recount the more astonishing aspects of aging.
    I know something else about this kind of caretaking. I am relatively unique in that this is my first episode of caretaking. I wasn't burnt out earlier. This wasn't, and still isn't, routine for me, this was and is adventure. Gladly, some of the tasks of this kind of caretaking have become automatic in a Buddhist sense. But I never aspired to caretaking. During some periods of my life I actively refused it. When I was presented with this opportunity I carefully considered it for 6 months before ultimately determining that in doing this for my mother, my sisters and all who love my mother I was also doing a most important task for myself: Ensuring that my mother would not become a source of worry and anxiety to me or to anyone who knows and loves her. This attitude, I sensed, would sustain me throughout whatever presented itself. This most recent episode of injury, weakness and frailty has successfully tested the sustenance.
    There is not much practical, workable advice available, either, on how the caretaker should negotiate medical management of the cared for when the caretaker, through advice and/or experience, knows better than the medical provider. This is an area that touches on all stages of caretaking but is especially significant when taking care of the elderly because of the dearth of information and research on what it is like to be old versus how we'd like to old age, especially our own old age. I do know one thing: The quality of feeling no different than one did when one was somewhere between ages 9 and 11 does not diminish with age. It is just a little harder to pull off in the body one has to haul around rather than a body by which one is transported. I am astonished, though, to realize that it is only a little harder to pull off.
    Our table top Christmas tree remains up. Neither of us has the heart to take it down. It has become only incidentally a Christmas decoration. The gods bless fiber optics.
    Oh. Yes.

6. Relate my day of living crazily.
7. Don't forget about the 'nursing home behavior' discussions and my ambivalence about them.
8. My mother's interesting reaction to the snow.