Imagine

Change usually isn't easy, but it's always possible.

Photo by Chang Ye on Unsplash

For a long time, I was the only professor on my university campus who taught our Intro to Women’s Studies class. Over the years, though, new faculty members came to the university and expressed an interest in sharing this part of my teaching load. That was a change I welcomed: Women’s Studies is a contentious field of study, and teaching the intro class was often stressful.

One of the things I always told students in the early days of the semester was Once you become aware of something, it will change how you see everything. And, sure enough, students would start seeing how many of their friends were involved in toxic relationships. Or they’d notice that, when a shade of nail polish or women’s clothing was categorized as nude, that color aligned with the naked skin of a specific group of women. Nude didn’t apply in the same way to everyone, even though we all get nude now and then.

I realized last week that becoming a caregiver has had a similar effect on my life: now that I’m aware of how many people need assistance, the whole world looks different. I have a neighbor, for example, who’s relatively new to our street. Last week I drove past him while he was out for a walk and noticed that he leans hard to one side. He takes small steps. The muscles in his legs seem very stiff.

I don’t know for a fact that my neighbor has Parkinson’s Disease, but he certainly shows all the signs. And he lives alone—maybe by choice, maybe because that’s his only option. Either way, there’s no one on hand to help him if he takes a fall and can’t get those stiff legs to cooperate.

In my beforelife—before Mike’s diagnosis, before I knew much of anything about PD—I’d probably have noticed that my neighbor has trouble walking and written it off to aging. He looks to be somewhere in his 70’s, so that would make sense. But I have a very clear idea of what Parkinson’s looks like now, so a specific set of details leads my thoughts in a very specific direction.

A similar thing happened to me at the grocery store recently. I walked past a couple—a woman pushing a cart, a man shuffling as he followed behind her, looking deeply confused when she told him to step to the side and get out of the way. Which side? What way? I realized right away that he might have some form of dementia, or perhaps a brain injury. In any case, this was not a partnership of equals: she was the caregiver, he was the person to whom she provided care.

I’m not entirely sure how I would have processed this situation differently in the before times. Perhaps I would have just offered a sympathetic smile, to let the woman know I don’t mind waiting for her husband (or brother, or cousin, who knows) to step aside. Then I’d probably get on with my shopping and not give her a second thought.

I do now, though. I offer that sympathetic smile, then walk away sending up a silent request: Please help her. Please let her have whatever she needs to get through this day, and the next one, and the next.

Another thing I used to tell my Women’s Studies students: Nothing ‘just is.’ Everything is how it has been made to be. And that means it can also be changed.

I said this by way of helping them rethink statements like “That’s just how people are.” If that were true, I explained, then there would be no change in cultural norms over time. But people do think differently now than they did even fifty years ago, and that’s how we know change is possible.

Long before Mike’s diagnosis, I understood that a culture in which caregiving is made more difficult by a lack of support isn’t just how things are. But I couldn’t really see what that culture looked like until I became a caregiver myself—now, I look around and see cracks in the system everywhere. Given the aging population in the United States, it seems obvious to me that our current system is poised for collapse.

I can only assume that our current system has been created by generations of people who never were (or expected to be) caregivers themselves—people who had the resources to make sure the full weight of someone else’s needs never fell on them. But it’s important for those of us struggling daily under that weight to remember that we don’t have to resign ourselves to things as they are. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Change is always possible. I don’t know what it should look like, exactly. It probably won’t be quick or easy. It might not even happen within my lifetime. Still—it’s possible. That’s the important thing to remember.

Anything created can be re-created. If we don’t keep that firmly in mind, we give up the power to imagine a system in which every caregiver—and every person who requires extra care—gets what they need to make it through another day.