Questions

Dinner at a Steakhouse with someone who has no teeth and is out to prove to her family, nieces, nephew and in-laws, she can eat like the best of us...Thank God, everyone came prepared in their knowledge.  Maybe it's wrong to be embarrassed but my husband thought his mother was out to prove a point: old does not mean incapable.  My 98 year old mother-in-law ate 2 racks of ribs-the big ones with only 2 ribs leftover, fries, bread and butter, tomato juice and a slice of ice cream cake plus her tea.  My children did not eat as much.  I honestly dreaded coming home because I thought she would have thrown up.  No, she ate and digested it all.

But my husband's cousin did bring up a point about homecare we have not considered.  Everything is very easy when an aged one is just old; what would our opinions be like should we have had a bed-ridden child?  My husband is almost 60, would he be able to lift an invalid adult male in 10 years?  My husband is a great guy and a very decent man; he figures our child would have grown up with us and our capabilities and we would make do the best we could.  I don't know what we would do...I am younger but in some ways not as strong as my partner.  But, then, I do most of the work with my mother-in-law and my children and I don't think a parent thinks about it; what has to be done, has to be done.  I did homecare for my mother-in-law for seven years before she came here; for the old, I think independence is a huge issue and I tried to facilitate my mother-in-law's independence for as long as I could.  For a child, growing up with challenges, I guess acceptance is the most important issue; a child must be accepted into a family and a family must accept a child.  It scares me to think of a family alone with no support to help an ill child, but it scares me more to think of a child alone with no family or any kind of support in some sort of institutional setting.