Same facts, different interpretations: No Fear.

One of the benefits of Internet writing, I think, is the valuable feedback you get from a variety of readers. Sometimes, our "diverse" worlds are very colorful and ethnic-friendly, but there really isn't a diversity of opinion shared.

Today, when reading this post by Annie Gottleib, I immediately thought of that short story (Baldwin, I think, maybe Ellison or Hughes though...), where the young boy is waiting at home for his mother, a domestic, to return from caring for somebody else's family so she can properly satisfy the needs of her own.

After the CNAs (certified nurse assistants) from hospice bathe and dress J and get him up, I like to hang out with them and have coffee before they go on to the next patient or (since we’re often their last stop)* to their family caregiving duties at home. Most of them are black (in all the multifarious shades of golden, freckled, ruddy and brown that word so flatly fails to suggest), and single motherhood is the norm in their community; the men have long since left or been kicked out, and those who’ve stayed are often described as not much help or not worth the trouble.
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On the plus side, mothers/grandmothers are always there to be relied on and to take care of babies and little children while daughter-mothers go to work and to school, struggling doggedly for education and certification and advancement. In return, they take care of their aging mothers who struggle with arthritis, diabetes, heart failure. It’s a hard life and takes a heavy toll on health.

There's something that stikes me as presumptous -- even from a woman who brags of graduating from the Harvard for women, in her time -- to sociologically evaluate the "poverty" of the women who care daily for your husband via free Hospice care.

I've enjoyed reading Ms. Gottleib's blog for some time now. Her husband is a big man with dementia, and Ms. Gottleib has written openly about her past abortion, and lack of family of her own to help care for this man who is no longer able to bear his own weight. The posts about qualifying him for Hospice care were interesting, as he is not chronically ill, and physically needs a great deal of help.

But -- just like she was able to swing not one, but 2, rent-controlled apartments in NYC for the two of them, even when moving down to North Carolina -- somehow Ms. Gottleib got him on. And now, she apparently waits each morn for the ... "girls" to wake, bathe and help her husband on the toilet. When her elderly parents pay for the plane ticket, Ms. Gottleib hires a caregiver while she escapes her family duties to visit them in Florida. Nothing wrong with that.

Today, I just referenced that short story, and pointed out that when I read the post titled, "Poverty is like Gravity", I was expecting Ms. Gottleib to have some witticism about how her financial status has sagged, along with her physical bits, as the good life caught up to her and him -- former boxer and bar owner.

Imagine my surprise when instead, she wrote a sociological take on the ... "help", perhaps while they were employed in bathing and dressing her husband. Reading blogposts like this, peeking in at other lives and lifestyles, it never ceases to amaze me the ... chutzpah some people have in putting facts out there, then spewing spittle and venom when you ask if they've read that Baldwin short story.

You know, the one about the ladies so busy caring for other people's white families, that they're just plain beat from the physical work in taking care of their own. "Live Simply, that Others May Simply Live." And the more that our society has changed, some entitlement systems sure do mimic plantation days.

I guess some men just get big and bloated, perhaps encouraged on by their admiring womenfolk, and then when it catches up to them, there's a government program and women in poverty, grateful for the chance to work. And stay after with the missus for a sup of coffee; surely she must be lonely and need the company too, and the girls can always spend a minute or two visiting, before they get home to their own waiting sons.

(Email me if you remember the author or find a link, please!)

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* I'm sure these ladies aren't ending their days before noon, so if this is the last stop of the day, what does it say that a wife waits until the help arrives "to bathe and dress and get him up'?

When I cared for a woman in South Florida, the visiting nurses said they preferred medical duties; some of those receiving the free services actually let their loved ones wait in soiled diapers until the "help" arrived to change them, rather than roll up their sleeves and provide immediate care for their family members. Funny how Ms. Gottleib's post reminded me of those days too, and how good Mal was to his own mother in the final years after her stroke. By participating to the end, Hospice was never called and the thankless duties didn't seem so bad.

It will be interesting in years to come, as the first round of the Boomers who have lived fast lives and are feeling the consequences withers, how we ration these types of free services. Personally, I think it should be means tested. If you're living in poverty, say. (More paying customers means higher working wages for the help; higher demand absent that = ... ? )