Mom & Me Five Archive

...and having difficulty determining what sort of higher education I should pursue, Mr. Eschbach, the junior counselor, offered to administer a test to me that promised to sift through my many skills and interests and narrow them down to a field of study and career that would be appropriate for me. I jumped at the chance. The test contained what seemed like thousands of questions designed (without the following inserted tongue-in-cheek) thus:

If you had a gun pointed at your head and were told that you had a choice to indulge in one of the following activities or die, which activity would you choose:

1. Rebuild a carburator.
2. Lead a group of Downes Syndrome youngsters in directed play.
3. Invent a better mousetrap and market it.
4. Promote someone else's career.
5. Paint a picture in watercolor.
6. Paint the side of a building.
7. Perform nursing duties in a hospital.
8. Perform an appendectomy.

    Although I applied myself with stark seriousness, the test wasn't easy for me. Sometimes, considering each group of activities, I'd rather rebuild a carburator than invent a better mousetrap, depending on the type of mousetrap. Sometimes I'd rather paint the side of a building than paint a picture, depending on the medium offered for painting the picture. Occasionally, the only suggested activity that looked interesting was performing surgery, even though I had, at the time, no interest in medicine. Never, though, was there a group of selections in which the activity that most interested me involved any kind of caring for any type of people.
    My results were disappointing. No preferences emerged. The results were so askew that Mr. Eschbach joked that, although cheating wasn't possible on such a test, it looked as though I had. The only result that was so clear as to be incontrovertible was this: "What ever you do, you should never go into the helping professions. It would be best if you chose a career that involved solitary labor."
    I wasn't surprised. If you've read a fair portion of my journals, you aren't surprised, either. I'm not a natural caregiver. Never have been. Never wanted kids. Never wanted to marry. Never even played with dolls. I tried living with a couple of lovers and succeeded only in kicking them out. I've been known as an excellent friend but only because I have a talent for advanced listening. I don't listen because I want to help or comfort people, although solace for the talker is often a fringe benefit of the skills involved in advanced listening. I listen because I'm a natural observer, keen to know everything I can absorb, consider it, combine it with other observations, play with a variety of stored observations mixed with new ones, see what I come up with. I have no problem doing this for an audience. My preferred environment, though, for observation (including listening), consideration, combination and play is an environment in which I am alone, or, at least, left alone.
    I've always been a loner; the kind of loner who admires and aspires to the lives of legendary hermits. I slept through my birth; that should tell you something about how interested I was in making contact with other humans. I haven't always thought I could live alone, but that wasn't because I was afraid of being alone; it was because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to support my lone self. Once I realized, in my early 20's, that I could, I was free, and satisfied to freely remain alone. I've always been annoyed with communal living rituals such as bonding chatter; bonding recreation; bonding meals. I find them distracting. Although we had many pets in my born-into family, I never took care of them, never really bonded with them, although I liked all of them and loved some. On my own, I had only one pet, a cat who preferred to be outside, so much so that he refused to use a litter box. I used to call him my dog-cat. Pets need care. I've always preferred to take care of myself, only myself. I'm not anti-social (which is odd, actually; I'm unusually socially adept, not only for a loner but for most non-loners) and have managed to nurture and keep my share (not other people's share, mind you, my share) of friends but, you know, my preference, on any day, is time alone over time with a treasured friend. As well, if I lose a friendship because the friend's demands are too great for me to accommodate or vice versa, oh well, I've still got my best friend: Me.
    Why am I telling you this? To severally underscore the following point: If there is anyone who does not come by caregiving naturally, who does not have a talent for caregiving, who was not made to be a caregiver, it's me. Want to talk caregiver challenged? I even prefer that other people not try to take care of me. I'm proud of these idiosyncrasies, still am, even though I'm, clearly, entangled in intense needs caregiving for my mother. I continue to cherish the memories of the days I figured out I didn't want to have children; didn't want to marry; didn't want to be a constant part of any one community; didn't want to live with my lovers; didn't want to live with anyone, even roommates; didn't want pets; didn't want friends who might consider me something to do if they couldn't think of anything to amuse themselves...
    Why is it important to me to make this point? Recently, a regular reader of my journals, someone I consider an online friend, expressed, in an e to me, concern about my recently published essay over at The Unforgettable Fund Blog. The concern was this: "...it occurs to me that some people are just not made to be caregivers, and then the question is what should they do to support those who are?"
    Interesting question to pose to someone who isn't made to be a caregiver but made one of herself, anyway.
    Here are my considerations in response to this question, in no particular order and not necessarily related, except by the circumstance of being the considerations of an unmade caregiver:

• It has long and widely been assumed that women, by virtue of having uteri, are "made" to be caregivers. When the above question is applied to fatherhood, which has often and staunchly been considered only a minor province of men, the answer has been, "Bring home the bacon." This has never worked well. For millenia, millions of women have found themselves in the position of having to bring home the bacon and be primary caregivers because their men haven't performed any kind of support that is useful. I know many women, in fact, some to whom I'm related, who assert that households run better when Mr. Provider is away. And, yet, we don't ask the above question about future fathers, and we never ask this question of women, even though all of us know of women who, despite their successful bearing of children, aren't made for caregiving. Few of these unmade female caregivers relinquish their caregiving role. Those who attempt this are usually vilified. If they are successful they become suspicious renegades from parenthood. If they remain caregiver parents, which most of them do, their lack of caregiving interest is usually responsible for the production of humans who are also not "made" caregivers and who resent their parents, as well, so much that, when their parents become elderly and need care, these children play the "I'm not made to be a caregiver" card. But, we seem to be only mildly concerned about this. Why, then, are we at all concerned about how those who are not made to give care can support caregivers to the elderly?
• How is a person "made" to be a caregiver? In my case, I made myself a caregiver, after 40+ years of seeing to it that I stayed as far away as possible from the caregiver making factory. I haven't thought about this enough to be able to delineate the process by which I made myself a caregiver, but I know why: I had a close enough and dynamic enough relationship with my mother so that I could not bear to be party to her becoming both tragically vulnerable to an uncaring society and a stranger to me in her Ancient years. I knew that I could bear figuring out how to care for both of us much more easily than I could bear alienating her in her Ancient years.
  I think no one is born a caregiver. Our capacity to give care is formed within the circumstances in which we are raised. Mostly, this machination is a process of subconscious, societal indoctrination and continues to apply largely to only one half of the humanity. It is a true miracle when one of that number resists the indoctrination. I am a miracle child. It is another miracle when such a person consciously decides to make themselves into a caregiver. That makes me a miracle adult. At least, that's this society's experience, at the moment.
  As well, it's obvious to me that our society isn't very good at making caregivers. Ideally, all of us should have the capacity to give some sort of care; enough of a capacity so that the question my online friend asked shouldn't have to be asked; enough, as well, so that no one ever feels overburdened by their caregiving tasks because everyone else has been "made" to have at least a minimal interest in minimal caregiving. I'm thinking that, if we have to ask the above question, we don't have any appropriate answers because we don't have an attitude toward caregiving that nurtures caregiving instincts in much of anyone.
• So, it seems, for myself, I answered the question of what sort of support I as an unmade caregiver could offer to those who are made to be caregivers by making myself into a caregiver. I admit, this is the hard way to do it and I can't say, even after 13.5 years, that I've completed the job. But, perhaps you'll understand when I step forward to answer this question on behalf of other unmade caregivers by saying, "Figure out how to give care, at least some, then go forth and give it, preferably to those about whom you care."
• Curiously, there are lots of people, including but not exclusively parents, who believe they were made to give care; except not to their elderly parents. Too little time available; too much energy required; too many other, often more preferable, demands; too much risk of losing oneself and/or one's life, carefully structured or not; too many relationship issues; too little interest in believing that relationships can always be changed and mended if the will is there...better to close the door and pass the care on to the professionals. I find it ironic that adult children who comfort themselves with the evidence of the new relationships their facilitized parents make continue to believe that renewing established relationships is impossible because their parents are old, demented and incapable of change. That's one type of oxymoronic thinking fostered in a society that is antipathetic to caregiving.

    I think we're all shell shocked, right now, by this business of caregiving. We are being forced to become aware of the care needs of our elderly parents, even as we're already aware of our inability to adequately meet the care needs of the families and communities we've created. The most poignant awareness we're experiencing is that, somehow, we've managed to build and nurture a society that does a horrible job of building and nurturing us. It's already obvious that it's going to be incredibly hard to make caregivers out of an entire society of people who weren't made that way from the get go. We're not yet convinced that we're going to have to do it anyway but, let me tell you, it doesn't matter whether we're convinced of this, we're going to have to do it because we are so care poor that we can't produce enough adequate professionals to handle caregiving for us. Sweat and suffering will be involved. Blood will be shed, as it usually is during birth. When the hard part is done, though, we just might find ourselves with children who won't even understand the question, "What should those who aren't made to be caregivers do to support those who are?" because, well, everyone will have a vested interest in caregiving for those about whom they care and no one will perceive caregiving as such an onerous task that they will assume they are not made to give care.
    Will I live to see that day? There's another good question...
    Later.