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Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot  Full disclosure: when I was 13, I was also doing all that, and more. Because apart from caring for myself, I had to help to care for my grandmother who was, by then, bedridden and suffering from dementia. While it was difficult, I was fully committed to the task, since she was, after all, the ine who cared for me when I was an even younger child.
So yes, I learned from a relatively young age not just to look after myself but also to look after others. |
Guess what? My mother didn't always live with her parents but when my grandmother was in need of help, we moved close to her and I lived in the house with her until she went to a medical facility with proper care.
I did all those same things.
And not because she did them for me but because I loved her. Honestly though, I would've done them for anyone else who needed me. There are people like that here in nasty old America, didn't you know?
So believe it or not, even though we're taught independence and to live on our own, we're also taught to take care of our family. It would have been a fight if someone told me otherwise while I was cleaning my grandmother's potty chair.
The difference was when she became completely bedridden we sent her to a place where the nurses could care for her properly, she could have physical therapy, and people knew what they were doing as to avoid hygiene issues and bedsores, etc. Sending her to a home was not a matter of GETTING RID OF HER or abandoning her, it was a matter of having a medically trained nurse care for her as opposed to a 13 year old which is how old I was at the time.
Lookie there, we have that in common.
