CHINGADA
There are two times where caregiving was the dominant theme. I will talk about the last first. I was a hospice volunteer. There are some people of a far more generous spirit who talk about how much they learn from this work, how they are really the ones helped out. Well, I suppose, but for me that caregiving was a one way street. I cared for you. You defecated on yourself until you died. I cared for you. You coughed up a lung. I think that when we hear the phrase “ethic of care” this is what we envisage, the one way street.
The most dominant phase of caregiving in my life was the period between transferring schools as an undergraduate when my paternal grandmother was diagnosed with bone cancer and came to live with us in a house that had two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, and then my maternal great aunt—who had raised me in place of a grandmother—was diagnosed with colon cancer and came to live with us too.
The ethic of care is divided by Tronto into attentiveness, responsibility, competence and the ability to respond. It is in the end, an ethic of paying attention to the world and the people around you. It is an ambiguous ethic not completely written down in words, but often in spirit and in paying attention to the moment.
The story should be told our fully to address who real care contrasts or agrees with theoretical care, and its suggested practice for society. My grandmother had never liked her son, my father, and wasn’t terribly fond of us. My mother spent a great deal of time bending over backward to be dutiful daughter-in-law to a woman she disliked and who disliked her. My father ran around trying to make her happy, doing special things which only annoyed her. They both annoyed her because in seeing a sick woman they were not seeing that she was the woman who had always been there: one who disliked us. To my father his duty was to be a charitable son who cared for his mother. My grandmother’s pleasure was to get away. In the end she actually called my father’s first wife who came from California and took her. My grandmother noted, as she climbed into the car that my father “abused her.” But what he tried to do was care and coddle for someone who did not care for him and did not wish to be coddled. Society said he should care for her and he was bound to do it no matter how much she herself was against it.
This crisis ended in my caring for my father—and let’s not go into who was caring for me. At the time my mother was in Chicago caring for her aunt—my dead grandmother’s sister. My aunt’s colon was removed, she had to use a smelly colostomy bag from then on. The apartment she owned was sold and she was taken from her home, in Chicago, in—yes—a ghetto to come to sunny South Bend and be cared for. In those last miserable months of the year, and of my aunt’s life, my mother was the same good martyr she always was. She and my father slept on the sofa bed (no one suggested that I give up my room) while my aunt had the master bedroom.
When I look back I see several things were happening. Up until then I’d been preparing to go to Notre Dame. After this experience I was determined to get the hell away from my family and care for myself. I was sure I could do a better job than my family. My aunt had been through miscarriage, abuse, three husbands and her lifelong neighborhood becoming a ghetto, but when my mother brought her here, with us, in a crowded house where she was no longer mistress, she worsened. She wasn’t used to having her niece or anyone else care for her and my mother, who has spent a lifetime working with the mentally retarded, still hasn’t learned how to treat someone under her care like an equal. I learned a great deal from my aunt in those last few months. I was having a horrible time in the classes I was taking, wanting to leave South Bend, needing a change, and she was wanting to leave and make that final change. She was my ally. I learned how listening leads to competence, how one has to give the person cared for what they ask for, what they really need. Not what you think they should want or need. The biggest part of caring is actually seeing who you are caring for.
This was the beginning of the end of the time when I really ever trusted my parents to get it right. This time in life marks when—regardless if I was living with them or not—I stopped depending on them in those big ways. A lesson here is that I did not become “independent” and do things completely on my own. I left the family unit, which was dying little by little and widened my circle. From now on caring and being cared for by others would be what mattered.
Someone told me that the people you ring in the New Year with are the people you will be with the entire year. So that New Year’s Eve I was with my best friends. We went outside and banged pots and pans at midnight and then came back inside. My aunt, who had been sleeping, complained of a pain and was taken to the hospital. That was the last time I saw her. I think I kissed her goodbye. We were both leaving the family.
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