Who Cares?
It’s hard to care about any one thing when we are all binge-drinking from the endless firehose of fuckstickery emanating from our phones. Hard not to feel numb and hopeless, like nothing matters anyway. But I’m not gonna talk about (waves hands around at everything that currently sucks.) I’m gonna talk about caring.
I don’t have kids. Never wanted any. I’ve never been much of a nurturer and have always protected my private writing time from the distraction of other people’s problems. I consider myself to be the kind of ride-or-die friend who would help you dispose of a body in the middle of the night, but I’m not so good with ongoing commitment.
And yet, here I am, about to turn 56 years old, living with and caring for my elderly mom.
I helped my father through hospice and dealt with all his papers and possessions after his death, but that entire experience was packed into three intense and surreal months. I’ve been living here in Washington, helping my mom and managing this quirky old house for three years.
Throw in a special needs dog and my own chronic health issue and it’s a fucking lot.
I know I’m not alone in this. So many of us are out here juggling chainsaws and kittens while our so-called government gleefully sets fire to the meager remains of our already laughably inadequate social safety net.
In the MAGA-verse, that kind of assistance isn’t needed because that’s what women are for. Caregiving is our biological destiny and to imagine that we are autonomous, sentient individuals with agency is just woke propaganda perpetrated by ugly feminist cat ladies who want everybody to be as miserable as they obviously are.
Enter the fantasy construct of the placid, blonde tradwife picking organic strawberries with a placid blonde infant on her somehow-still-pre-teen-sized hip while her Alpha husband is out there earning masculine bacon doing good honest Man-Work.
She’s all over social media these days, but I find it interesting that in this traditional (read: white Christian) family fantasy, there doesn’t seem to be any place for elders.
You never see one of these tradwives helping her mom to the bathroom and cleaning her up if she doesn’t make it. You don’t see her calming grandpa down when he’s frightened and agitated because he has no idea who all these people are. You don’t see her untangling multiple financial disasters because an elderly relative fell for one too many online pig-butchering scams.
If there are “eldercarefluencers” running monetized YouTube channels or showing off their aspirational caregiving lifestyles on TikTok, I’ve never seen them.
Because elder care is considered a private, solitary duty that must be handled off-camera and without complaint by (mostly) women who are too broke to pay an even poorer woman to do it for them. And those who can afford help are still stuck wrangling the full time project management of it all.
This recent essay from Oldster about aging and caring for our elders does center the heteronormative perspective, but I still found it deeply moving and thought provoking. Particularly this bit:
I’ve come to believe that care is our only real currency—in how we notice, listen to, and respond to each other—closely, in community. This is not simple or easy. Caring is inconvenient. It takes time we don’t think we have and forces us to lead with curiosity and trust, even across otherwise treacherous divides, including shame or guilt over our own (in)actions. At least one school of trauma-informed therapy teaches us to imagine reaching the child we once were, the children others once were. I suggest it’s equally as humanizing to imagine the aged or ill we will each become.
I think this concept of cultivating and leaning on community rather than going it alone is doubly important for queer people and others who have created their own unconventional families. We can’t always count on biological family to provide the help we need as we age, so we have to find ways to build our own systems of support.
But if it takes a village to raise a child, why can’t the same logic apply to elder care? Maybe because it seems important and inspiring to help a new person develop their potential as they find their way in this crazy world, but helping an old person let go and prepare to say goodbye to this world is just too scary. Too real. Too close to home.
We need to do it anyway, because nobody is coming to save us. We need to be there for our own families (bio and/or otherwise) and for each other as we age.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. Most of my closest friends are scattered all over the world and I’m not very good at making new ones. I also struggle with admitting that I need any kind of help.
It’s one thing to ask a friend to help you move a sofa, but it’s an entirely different thing to ask a friend to take care of you while you go through chemotherapy or help you navigate all the complex and confusing legal paperwork when a loved one dies. It’s equally tough to commit to providing that kind of help.
If I could have my perfect fantasy family life, I wouldn’t want a tradwife. I’d want a pit crew. What I really want is a big, boisterous gang of friends and lovers with different skills who can help out with different things in different ways. That way no one person would get stuck doing everything all by themselves.
But until that happens (hit me up, handybutches and naughty nurses!) I’ll just be over here doing my usual stoic Atlas routine.
Speaking of NYC, I’ll be there next week. If you still haven’t ponied up for my chat with Rob Hart, remedy that shit pronto.
Also, there’s this.
See you there, Faustketeers!