Ellen Pober Rittberg: Books
WHY IS GRANDMA NAKED? Caring for Your Aging Parent
In this humorous self-help book, award-winning journalist and attorney Ellen Pober Rittberg serves as a guide and cheerleader to family members who undertake to care for their elderly parents. Sharing the stresses and satisfactions when caring for her aging mother, Rittberg uses comical chapter headings such as:
Be The Alpha Dog
Boundaries? Huh? Your Aging Parent Has None
Your Parent May Develop Sticky Fingers
JEOPARDY! (why elderly parents need their favorite show even when they can't answer any of the questions)
Rittberg employs an upbeat breezy, can-do tone. She details common scenarios and techniques she used when caring for her aging parent at home, such as:
Toilet training your senior parents using the "rump on the hump" technique when incontinence is an issue
Taking away car keys before reading about a parent in a newspaper crime blotter
Their hobby of digging deep into their nostrils and other recesses
Staying awake while hearing the nineteenth retelling of childhood stories from your parent with dementia
Playing matchmaker to hired caregivers
Avoiding shopping trips turning into shoplifting trips
Understanding declining parents' sometimes hilarious fantasies and delusions.
Rittberg shares with readers the life-changing, humbling and deeply rewarding benefits of caring for elderly parents and knows a good belly laugh is the best stress reliever.
You can also buy the book on:
excerpts
ON PARENTS’ BODIES AND BODILY FUNCTIONS :
To your parent, the human nostril is not something to be wiped periodically. It is now a top Travel and Leisure destination. If you’ve previously been unsure which human body part is connected to what other body part, wonder no more! Instead, spend a few moments observing Dad practicing The Scientific Method. (Remember middle school science class where you learned to formulate a hypothesis, test it out and then come to a conclusion?) Your parent’s conclusion is they like having their fingers up there!
Putting an absurd spin on this: maybe they just want to give their fingers a workout. Consider their behavior a variant form of chair yoga. Or think of your parent as a modern-day John Rambo in First Blood. He is merely thinking up makeshift ways to cause pain to himself and extreme discomfort to others using what is the most primitive but effective tool known to man: a finger.
ON WHY AGING PARENTS ARE OBSESSED WITH JEOPARDY:
Maybe it has something to do with the blissed-out set, all plexiglass and bright that puts them in a state of blissed-out-ed-ness. (Ditto for Wheel of Fortune.) Because Mom felt so connected to Alex Trebek and Jeopardy!, I saw an opening of sorts even though she was quite declined. We’d discuss the color of Alex Trebek’s tie and how his tie coordinated with his suit. We noticed when he had his hand in a cast.(And it made him all the more relatable to Mom, what with her recent fall.)
ON DECLINING PARENT’S INABILITY TO SEPARATE REALITY FROM T.V
Through time, your parents’ ability to separate their lives from the lives of the people on television disappears. Mom had a minor obsession with the man in the Trivago commercial. To hear her tell it, she had all the inside dirt on Trivago Guy. Mom told my son that when they first hired the Trivago Guy, he didn’t look very clean-cut, but then they gave him a makeover and tidied him up.
Mom also enjoyed analyzing (what she believed was) the producer’s clever attempts at disguising the Proressive Insurance Lady’s expanding girth, which Mom attributed to Progressive Insurance Woman’s pregnancy. That set me to wondering why the producer had chosen to attire Progressive Insurance Lady all in white, which is not a color that is good at disguising girth. That I spent time mulling over this, and occasionally still do, concerns me greatly.
ON INCONTINENCE:
Assuming your parents can hold it in long enough to get to the bathroom and want to hold it in, their goal (and yours) is to get there in time for the rump to hit the toilet seat bump. That our parents succeed in getting to the bathroom on time or at least giving it that old college try is all that matters. And please, don’t hold back if your parents need encouragement. Remind them about The Little Engine That Could. Clap. Cheer. Be over the top. Give them gold stars. And enjoy this period while it lasts. Because it won’t last. It’s like bird migration. Here today, gone tomorrow.
ON THE LATER STAGES OF INCONTINENCE:
There may come a time when you think that your parent is in pain. But, no. You have simply caught her in the middle of the act. She is not embarrassed, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed for her. However, what you might want to do is give a heads-up to other family members who don’t realize Mom or Dad or Grandma or Grandpa have reached this new low in the Annals of Incontinence.
