E

Have you noticed how life is a series of options? Take parentage; you are, like it or not, 50% of the equation, but....pregnant? Run or stay? Cohabit or marry? The options go on forever; my personal choice was to stay, and I did, with a woman who had travelled to one hundred and forty two countries; great! I could dig that, I love travel, but.... her option was to not travel again...... while my job needed me to cover the country; you know, two cars, nice house, dinner parties with her dull choice of friends.... holidays in all the right places... it costs, so my option was to stay in the job; till I'd had enough, that is, and my option was to work from home, when I discovered my other half was exercising her option to talk on the phone for six hours average a day, and my option was to leave. Then one discovers where the options end; Statistically, children cared for by a single parent don't do well, in all the studies I can find, but all the children cared for by a single MALE parent do BETTER THAN THE NORM FOR EVEN TWO PARENT FAMILIES. Yeah, dude, where do you find a government department who isn't statitistically driven? Yet where do you find a society where the male is given possibly an even chance with the female to be principal caregiver? When I failed twice, at enormous expense, to have custody of my children, I hired a court clerk to research why I lost the case. First fact; choose a lawyer with absolutely no scholastic associations to the lawyer of the other party, or, if that must be the case, choose a lawyer higher up the pecking order (Yes.) than the other party. Second fact; IF I had won my case, I would have been the first male in 2008 custody cases in my court, to have won..... and the reason I have laid out all this stuff is that the parents of my generation, who were married before and during the second world war, MIGHT have had those options, but generally didn't exercise them; for better or for worse they stayed together, and looked after us in their own, unique, inimitable ways. And I think of my friends, and their parents, and right or wrong, good or bad, they were usually there, for their kids. Now most of those souls are gone, and a new generation is now dealing with the elderly. I have already voiced my distaste for demographics, but there is a huge demand for care of the elderly, and a new generation of suits are being hired by principally religious institutions to ramp up the game of care of the elderly. This varies across various countries, but my partner is French, and back home there are 17,500 people over ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF AGE. They have some crazy deals going there; the best is when a person buys the house of an elderly person, and allows them to live there till they die, when the buyer then takes title to the property, and can move in or whatever. France's oldest woman, at 122, was such a lucky person; she had outlived the buyer..... and seemed pretty chirpy about it. But if you live in a place too big, or too remote for contact with a far flung family, moving into residential care is the dreadfullest thing you can do for yourself, even the glossiest of brochures never telling you the thing that will kill you; My parents moved, against my wishes, to such a 'nice' place. The catastrophe just got bigger and bigger; the removal company, an international outfit of 'repute,' lost most of their posessions, and the insurance documents were so complex they'd insured only the things they didn't value..... and the building, a modern chipboard box, had long term leaks from the modern plumbing practices, which put formaldehyde into the air especially near the kitchen, causing vertigo and sudden falling down in two of the healthiest oldies one could wish for. Dad died real quick; I'd exercised my option to stay and care for them, which is why I know so much about sick buildings, and I moved mother to another box with no leaks, but still sick, while the management stripped out and repaired the original killer box. Mother didn't go back there; she was too ill, but died a magnificently lingering death, where every aspect of the 'elderly care' nonsense could be examined closely and found totally wanting, from the 'angel of death' nurses with their pint bottles of morphine, the 'patient alert' gadget with the button to call help, on a chain, slipped behind the fallen patient who waited four hours for me to find her (I'd been absent five hours, and could find none of my six nearby family members to stand in) to the undertaker, who, I would have imagined, would have been able to assess the length and depth of a corpse and get a box that fitted, but no; they all got it wrong. The only bit they got right was the money, every time on the button, heaps and heaps of it, from my parents' pocket to theirs, and my parents' 'investment' dragged down to nothing by a group of Presbyterians who continue to this day to 'care for the elderly'. So I have been coaching my partner through the process of losing her favourite grandparents, and watching just a small variation of this 'elderly care' taking its toll on two people my lady values very highly, and when it is your turn, will you have changed anything? We all know where to start. We all know where it ends. I don't plan to be in any of the options available this day. Nuff said.