Description

When award-winning journalist, humorist and attorney Ellen Pober Rittberg moved in to become a caregiver for her aging mother, she thought she had a leg up because she'd represented senior citizens for years in court and even wrote reports and recommendations on guardianship cases for judges. Instead she felt stressed-out, overwhelmed and unsure what to do with the sometimes-weirdness and extreme changing behaviors of her Mom, but she figured things out and humorously and practically walks the reader though such things as: getting their parents' "rump on the (toilet seat) hump" a/k/a the stages of incontinence; what to do when Mom or Dad starts stripping off their clothes in front of a large picture window; dealing with parents' shoplifting anything not nailed down, and what to do when they discover the "deepest recesses of their nasal passages"; developing a support system ("you're not good at everything. No one is";) purging the word "convenience" from your vocabulary; and the other most-common scenarios caregivers will experience. Part-cheerleader, part-person-who-has-been-in-the trenches, Ellen says if she could do it, the reader can too, and she also movingly describes the joys and lilfe-transformation she experienced and which Midwest Book Review describes as "expertly written and thoroughly 'user friendly'" and "essential reading" and which a Reedsy reviewer described as, "that rare book that can make you laugh and cry at the same time."