Where is My Wolf Pack?
Caring for Mom is as much about isolation as caring for babies can be about building community
Outside, I watch as new parents connect with each other, recognizing same/same, like attracting like, strangers become friends, building a community, creating the village. They have Mommy & Me groups, Yoga baby classes, and as early as birthing & Lamaze classes they’re creating adult communities centered around being a 24-hour caregiver, a parent. This hedge against the isolation & loneliness built into a life of caring for an utterly dependant being happens seemingly effortlessly, like making a snowball, keep adding same to same until you have a solid. They become a wolf pack of babies, baby daddies and baby mamas.
It’s a beautiful day and I’m pushing Mom down 34th Avenue, part of the new “Open Streets” that developed during the pandemic quarantine. No car traffic for twenty blocks, it’s home to joggers, cyclists, walkers and the dreaded electric scooters. Dogs, kids, and the wolf pack of new parents carrying or pushing newborns and toddlers.
Where is my wolf pack? My same/same? Those of us who push our parents around in wheelchairs instead of strollers. A few years ago, Mom and I had had the company of dogs & dog owners. But now, like the newborns, Mom struggles to communicate, to understand and be understood. Babies learn new things and sponge up the world; Mom is busy forgetting everything, the opposite of a sponge, her brain is wringing itself out and occasionally she rediscovers something–a bush that surprises her every day, or a dog that’s greeted her every single day, but is new to her every time and may or may not confuse her.
Long ago, in a world before playdates & day care, I was a kid and she was the grownup. Stay-at-home moms (which was almost all moms in the 50s) made friends with other neighborhood moms. They took turns, one mom would oversee a passle of kids while the others did the things you can’t do when you have a kid that needs to be taken to the potty, or fed, or soothed, or entertained all the time. How nice would that be, to drop Mom off with someone for a day or an evening? Or stick the olds together in another room, the way they did to us as kids in a shared playpen or fenced-in backyard, while the adults have coffee together in the kitchen, unburdening, laughing, sharing secrets, advice and anxieties. Coffee and a collective breath, grateful that we’re not alone with the struggle or the joy.
Like a new parent, I’m overwhelmed with caregiving, with the not knowing, what ifs, is that just an aging pain or something serious that needs a doctor’s attention. And what’s the right choice when your person has a DNR and would never have chosen to live like she’s living. Do parents of special needs kids share their secret wishes with each other, those things you can’t say aloud? Like any new mom, I crave adult conversation and community, someone who is going through the same thing at the same time.
Earlier this month, Sue Fagalde Lick of the Substack Can I Do It Alone? posed the question, can you make new friends as an adult. The effort it takes to make friends once you’re grown resonated with me.
Not very long ago, before me & Ma became roommates, I had twice monthly ninety-minute community in the form of a support group for caregivers whose loved one was in early stage dementia. We were each other’s elders, we ancestored each other. Whatever Mom was going through, someone else had dealt with it already. No matter what feelings I was having, someone else had had them. Support is an invaluable resource for keeping your sanity, especially when the scenario is constantly in flux, like with babies growing up and olds growing old. I was there five years, up until shortly after she moved in with me when I lost the luxury of having ninety minutes free.
One person of that group is still in my life. We live a few blocks from each other and see each other once a year or so, promising to make it more often, but dementia makes the rules and making plans for adult conversation and company is harder than it sounds.
Babies are an open invitation to join the walk along the avenue, for strangers to smile at you, to share time and laughter with other grownups holding or pushing the most important thing in their lives. The ease and simplicity of being part of a growing snowball, of having a naturally forming wolf pack that doesn’t require schedules and planning, it’s not part of the culture of growing old, or caring for someone who is already old.
I push my most important person along the avenue, watching the wolf pack of procreators with a soft loneliness and silent envy.
Recommended Read: This Tin House article from 2013: The Search for Granny Dump Mountain by Justin Nobel, an exploration into the myths of senicide.
So beautiful, Jodi. "I push my most important person along the avenue, watching the wolf pack of procreators with a soft loneliness and silent envy." I hear you. And I love the voiceover. It's a treat to hear you read.