The New Old Age - Caring and Coping
December 20, 2010, 12:55 pm
One of Those Days
By PAULA SPAN

If you find elder care a daily source of fulfillment, a gift that draws you ever closer to your aging parent, a continuing privilege — well, you can stop reading now.

I’m betting that everyone else engaged in this stressful and sometimes relentless activity has, at least occasionally, entertained the dark thoughts expressed in a scathing blog post making the rounds.

Matt N. lives on Staten Island, looking for work as a systems programmer and sharing a house with his 64-year-old mother. She’s always driven him a bit nuts, he confesses. “To be polite, I’d call her persnickety,” he told me. Actually, he would call her much worse than that, but unlike his blog, called The Lunatic’s Asylum, The New Old Age avoids profanity.

Recently, his mother had knee replacement surgery and suddenly required much more hands-on care. Her demands led Matt (to keep peace in the family, or at least to prevent outright warfare, I’m omitting his last name) to spiraling fury and to this comic screed, which is unfair, ungrateful and uncouth — and made me laugh out loud.

Warning: Readers will find his observations — “I’m seeing parts of my mother’s anatomy I haven’t seen since the day I was born” — sprinkled with words unprintable in The New York Times. And readers should browse the rest of his blog only with caution — Matt’s rants include offensive references to an array of groups and institutions, including various immigrant groups, unions, the giant bank that was his former employer and the entire third world — and that was only this month’s fusillade.

But if you’re having One of Those Days on the elder care front and could use a blast of black humor, read on.

“I have new respect for professional caregivers and what they must go through,” Matt told me. “They deal with miserable people all day long. That they don’t smother them with pillows is amazing.”

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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