I was driving home from work listening to the stereophonic radio. It was an interview, Terry Gross and author Alice Sebold.

Apparently. in the first pages the chick in her 40s smothers her demented mater. The clear circle of purgatory or hell for many a woman, caring for the elderly mom.

In the interview, they were talking about the essentially societal assumption that I dutiful daughter minds her mother up until, well, forever or death, whichever comes first. There’s the foregone conclusion, and many a woman is postponing or altering whatever happens next to care for mom.

It got me thinking. Got me thinking about Pat, of course, about my life, of course. (Of course, just about everything makes me think of me, possibly even civil unrest and genocide. I think therefore I am self-involved.) Anyway, of course, a selfish little corner of my soul is OK with the bullet I dodged. My whole family for a couple generations doged the bullet.

Thankfully, the generations in my fam tree tend to skew long and old. Three out of four of my grandparents had gone before the cells that split into me materialized. Hell, a school-hood memory from a million years or so ago had a rather unimaginative teacher correcting me for what had to be my misunderstanding. I was the only kid in class who’s dad had been of age to serve during WWII, the big one. (Sure, it was Jersey he protected, but someone had to mind the shore.) Stupider, yet, or so the teach thought, my grandfather couldn’t have really been a doughboy in the first war to end all wars.

Yeah, bitch, I hallucinated with my school-age mind that old picture in sepia tones with gaiters and the Smokey the Bear hat.

Anyway, point is, lot of folks were older when they were old. Even though Pat’s 72 wasn’t exactly aged now that 65 is the new 50 and shit like that.

For comparison’s sake, a couple or three of the people I work with are living the new, modern day, boomer problem. I know some folks who are retirement age themselves caring for elderly parents. A woman my age was telling me about her parents and how she’s started worrying about them, even as her mom’s mom, or some other drandparental unit, needs more constant care. How much must that suck?

Maybe I could change my own adult diaper, but not if I had to worry about someone else’s too.

I think I want to write about my life and the layers of dealing with my own mom, because it was always complex for me. I knew I was the youngest, I knew the parental invincibility started to breakdown on my watch, as the last kid to leave the house. Since about the first time I called home from Syracuse and my liberating college life, when Pat wailed into the phone her loneliness, her mortality, her depression, I figured out a certain level of duty for myself.

Consciously and sub-consciously and without any thought at all, I hung around. I feel like I did delay some parts of my life. Hard not to sit 3,000 miles from that home, fitting in to a different environment and chilling, and not think about my delay in getting started on this life’s phase.

But, Pat was Pat. Like her father before her, she wasn’t gonna go all sweet and gentle into the caretak-ee role, and demand that those around her pic up the slack. My grandfather let my mother, and/or told her to, hire a private nurse, her friend from the local school system, to give him a hand. She would have wanted us to do the same, and she definitely told me as much.

No matter. The truth is, if I did sacrifice (a highly, majorly, hugely debatable assertion), I still got off easy. In my 40s, there is still a long way to go to get started on life. I mean, I might actually reach my newest goal, published by 50 or suicide by 52 to be published posthumously and rake in the big literary dough.

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