(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Word of the day at Street Prophets: "Infantilization" [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-02
Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour, the place where politics meets up with religion, science, art, nature, and life. Come in, have a cuppa and a cookie (or three!) and join us. Street Prophets is an open thread. All topics are welcome.
Okay, I know I’m the old lady who sits in the rocking chair with a cat on her lap and knits. Or works on the computer, cat in lap. (Looking at you, Taffy.) I’m the living stereotype. And, as it goes, I’ve been stereotyped as the old lady by friends and family. Well, not by my daughter’s family, because they know me so thoroughly, and because of the way I raised my child. But other people?
For a few years now, I’ve had to depend on a friend who lives across the city and a cousin who lives north of the city to accompany me to medical procedures where I’ll be given anesthesia, because you know I won’t be given the procedure without someone on site to drive me home after. So far, that’s reasonable.
But when your blonde hair is mostly white, you can’t walk without a staff (two trekking poles in public), and you have seven doctors on your list, attitudes change. Not my attitude, mind, but the attitudes of my designated drivers.
It’s been a dozen years since I first heard the word “infantilization.” Yes, it takes me a bit of time to get into an SUV. (What ever happened to runningboards, anyway?) It takes me a bit of time to unfold and get out of a car after I’ve been sitting a while. But my body has deteriorated faster than my intellect. I don’t need to be treated as incompetent.
I know my cousin saw a friend and then both parents through their last days. She thinks of herself as the take-charge person. I watched her infantilize her father for the last few years of his life and it irritated him no end, but he didn’t have the skills of a lifetime of standing up for himself, and he couldn’t develop those skills in his 90s.
My friend was the only surviving child and was the person in charge of her mother’s care in the final years. Unlike my uncle, my friend’s mother did have Alzheimer’s and needed a decision maker.
Both of these women have spoken to me as though I’m unable to manage my own decisions. They’ve both heard the word “infantilize”, as in “Oh, no, we’re not infantilizing me just yet.” Because I did learn more than half a century ago how to set limits. They seem startled, but they do back off and return to a normal interaction.
My step-father, starting when I was young, would quash any comment, from anyone, about how an older person should do things differently by saying, “They’ve lived XX years on their own terms. They got this far and don’t need advice now.”
Just a thought, whichever end of this you may be on at some point in your life.
The thread is now open. All topics are welcome.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/2/2209260/-Word-of-the-day-at-Street-Prophets-Infantilization?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
