The issue of care

Subject: FW: The issue of care.

 

 

Of the more dramatic confrontations in life that between parent and child is the most contentious. As a child grows up there are moments along the way when the child rebels and does anything and everything to oppose the parent. The teenage years are an example when whatever the advice the teenage boy or girl is given they simply reject it a nod seek alternative answers in a culture closer to their own age group. Frustrated the parent can only sit back and hope that the lessons learnt in the early stages of the relationship surface again without too much damage being done.
There's the inevitable breakdown  as the new adult seeks to justify their own rational as to their own concept of the how and the where fore. All the lofty folk law of parenting is examined and much of it thrown out, all the old surety of wisdom, born of past experience is challenged and deemed old fashioned and certainly past the sell by date. The respect for the parents advice slowly vanishes and in its place, a challenge to ageing which pre-highlights the more acutely defined senility and the need for care which accompanies the outlying assumption that the children will be caught in the process which will inhibit their lives.
There is no acknowledgement, more should there be, of past favours repaid, only the fear of inevitable inconvenience. This perceived encroachment into their lives makes the child of the ageing parent critical of the stages of old age. The unsteadiness, or the loss of memory, brings home the insecurity which old age brings and which is then, like osmosis assumed by the children as a chore best not acknowledged, other than in the frustration it brings by its sheer inevitability.

The colour of the baby-grow, the exciting jazzy patterns of tiny clothes, the expected beauty of a new born child with all its potential is the counter opposite to the mental incongruity of a parent approaching old age. The vision is a very different one, from  the expectant anticipation bound up in a baby and the opportunities it heralds to the dread incomprehension of how will I cope with an ageing Mom and Dad.
There is always the augury that what is happening was never spelt out in any way, that parents simply faded away into rose filled Gardens, the sound of another addition of the Archers playing on the radio and the kettle boiling in the kitchen. The strong, well lined weathered old biddy still pruning her flowers, the old man writing his memoirs sipping his first brandy of the day, each a pocket dynamo, right until the end which reliably came conveniently, in their sleep.
With the advances in medicine we stave off this date when we are called by nature until ro often we have become  a poor resemblance to what would have been had  the medics not got their hand in. The end now-a-days can be well beyond our "use by date" and the implications for young and the old have changed. The old social implication of the state taking care of the elderly has changed. It is now more a matter of how much money you have in the bank as to how far as your care is contrived  and given the atomised nature of the family, living next door or down the street is not an option. It has been replaced by busy people living hundreds, if not thousands of miles apart.
There's no easy answer to the care or mindful eye a daughter or a son can keep on  their ageing parents and since the scourge of dementia, when the physical body outlasts the mind this final ignominy would be better handled by a quick confrontation with the 49 bus than  a trail of bills from the new care centre, set up under Boris Johnson  from a head office in New York.