Padre y madre de familia

One of the vivid images I got from this trip is that of my mother sitting on the floor after she lost control of her bladder function, crying out to my youngest brother who stopped by to check on her: “Please do not send me to a nursing home!”

I remember reading of China parents who sued their son for neglect and non-visitation, and although I have three professional siblings who check on my Mom periodically, it has now become clear that Mama needs 24/7 nursing care that even the combined efforts of the three cannot supply.

Nursing home is a nightmare for many seniors. Compensation has replaced compassion among workers, and privatized, the practices of service providers look more at the health of the bottom line before the wellbeing of clients.

The care of elders is a hot potato in the U.S. these days. We took our SVES 6th graders to man’amko in an annual retreat not too long ago. Elders and students entertained each other over lunch at the Aging Center in Gualo Rai.  Students were assigned to talk to a man’amko and listen to their recollection of the past, and write about it. Elders relished the chance to have someone listen to their stories.

Relating to seniors came personally impactful to me because I am the eldest son in my family and traditionally, either the eldest male or the youngest child is vested with the care of parents. Our youngest assumed legal trusteeship of our parents when they needed one, handled well the internment of our father who at an advanced age of 94, gave up his senility in Hawaii.

I had been by default the surrogate padre de familia after my Papa pursued graduate studies in the United States in the mid-’50s while Mama and five kids were left behind in the Philippines. I was only 10.

However, I turned out to be a peripatetic pedagogue whose legal residency in Hawaii extends only to an address and a driver’s license. I was going to quit the CNMI a few years back to be close to my parents but my Papa died before I could do so; discovery of my spondylosis also derailed the process. Another brother swaths geographic coverage of photo shoots far and wide, making our youngest brother the practical trustee.

Thus, youngest son took the patriarchal role of ensuring that attention due our mother is given without reservation and with minimal consideration to cost. He, however, also has a career, and time available to spend is only during off hours and weekends. Happily, he is unencumbered by wedded roles; he also is freer to extend financial assistance on my mother’s welfare when needed.

So, youngest brother and sister have become the surrogate padre y madre de familia. Not rich, they and the rest of the siblings professionally deliver public service and assistance programs, and expend resources in many volunteer efforts. In the last days of our Papa’s life when we placed him in the care of a nursing home, he rebelled fiercely by escaping out into the night like a juvenile skipping home when no one was looking.

Our youngest brother’s work in the public correction system affords him less than a cursory familiarity with human motivation and manipulation; he is familiar with the phenomenon of family members being the worst abusers of their own kin, as well as elders’ refined manipulation of relations in scheming for the attention they require. That prevailing “story” at times set our brother’s mental equilibrium a-kilter relative to mom, seeing actuations of other children to be “abusive,” and mother’s call for attention patently coercive. It is not a pleasant state of being; the story determines behavior.

We remind those challenged with the care of family members, of the differently-abled and the elders, that intentional mindfulness and strategic compassion remains an option of the family, not an automatic virtue of paid caregivers designated to serve that function. Members of extended families in our time are geographically stretched as members now call on relations only by phone or through the Internet. The nuclear family inadequately replaced extended relations, and add to that vestiges of patriarchy and the resurgence of matriarchy, calcified masculine bullheadedness and combative feminine insurgence, many husbands and wives wage the gender war in the American landscape.

It might be helpful to be reminded that masculinity and femininity has less to do with wearing pants or skirts; it has to do with supporting and nurturing members of any social unit, in this case, a family.

Those of us unable to provide 24/7 care for our elders, let us, at least, make sure that we humanize the nursing homes with our bombardment of compassion and care, however that is expressed. The fundamental issue is for elders to be accorded respect not as an object of condescension, tolerance, and paternalism especially as their physical, emotional and mental faculties begin to recede and wane, but as full members of the human race where they belong, not in the first instance for their sake, but for ours.

Being the padre y madre de familia is not a genetic assignment. It is a choice.