MenGetPregnantToo

Caring for Caregivers - Expert Advice on Coping with Dementia

Throughout the various stages of parenthood, people have always referred to “the woods.” As infants, once our children slept through the night we were (supposedly) “out of the woods.” However, the forest was far more expansive than those early parenting metaphors suggested. Toilet training? Woods. Feeding themselves? Woods. Walking? Woods.Tropical, temperate, boreal. Woods, woods, woods.

Recently, when my eldest child turned 13 years-old, I benefited from the wisdom of friends whose sons and daughters have passed through the fires of adolescence. I realized I was not out of any woods. I am now, rather, strolling the pastures between them. Drivers licenses and drinking ages were crouched like bandits in the forest beyond the next bluff.

But, as with many of my sandwich generation peers, the next thicket bloomed even sooner than predicted; my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy Body dementia. I have reflected on the trials, fears, and compromises necessary to see to it that she is being well cared for, as well as to accept what I cannot change. Through that article, and conversations since, I realized what a comfort it was for me to talk with not only other children of parents afflicted with dementia willing to share their struggle, but also to have access to the reassurance and expertise of those who support and treat victims of cognitive illnesses.

Though these diseases can manifest themselves through myriads of different symptoms, the caregivers’ challenges (and stresses, and fears) are remarkably similar. While families are often thrown into a state of panic by the realization of what steps must be taken to protect their parent, medical staff who specialize in caring for patients and their families rarely encounter a scenario they are not familiar with.

Sabrina Dion is a registered nurse at a private residence which specializes in caring for men and women at various stages of loss of autonomy.

She sympathises with those living with the emotional weight of moving a parent into a home for the first time. While altruism is an able motivator, the burden can detract from - and begin to deteriorate - the caregiver’s relationship with their spouse, their children, and their career. Dion says this can have devastating emotional costs:

Families are very upset, families feel a lot of guilt, families are going through a crisis.
Parents are no longer in their home, their safety’s at risk. So it’s a rush to get them into a safe environment.
It’s a struggle between, “How I am going to handle my home life?” and, “How am I going to make sure my mom or my dad, or either, or both is ok?”
And then I remind them, “What you’re doing is looking out for your mother’s or father’s best interests. You know they’re in an unsafe environment, and you know you can give them a better quality of life given you can’t change the outcome of dementia or Alzheimer’s.” 
This is where it becomes a mish-mash, this is where it becomes really challenging. You have to have a career, you have to get to work, you have to take care of your children. The you have to make sure that your parents - if they’re compromised with the loss of autonomy or of cognitive deficits - are taken care of as well. It’s a lot. Caregiver burnout, that’s the big thing that I look for...that’s my red flag.
Because you taking mom or dad to your home, and not being able to be there and not being able to understand, and burning out, is not going to help them in the long run.

Dominic Smith - Elder and Rehabilitation Care

Caroline Ménard is a psychologist, and coordinator of the Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia team at the University of Montreal Geriatric Institute. She says it is often easiest to think of this time as a time to mourn^*:

It is no longer the mother or the person you knew. It is like mourning for the person you used to know; mourning for them before their passing. It is mourning for what was their daily life, which has now become the loss of a driver’s license or the person leaving their apartment. There is also the loss of the person they used to be; they may have been very reserved and now they act out. Those changes can be very, very emotionally difficult.

 Once the elderly parent is removed from the dangers of autonomy, the child and lifelong friends of the patient become spectators of the slow, long-term ravages of cognitive decline. The patient’s personality changes, their physical abilities diminish, and their memory becomes confused and diffused. Dion spoke to me about those feelings of helplessness:

You can visit your parent, and the parent doesn’t recognize you. That’s a really difficult one for children to deal with. That’s when a lot of the children come to my office and it’s like, “Wow, I can’t believe that just happened, that person is my mother.”
So it’s to remind them that if they call you your brother or your husband or tell you, “I know you but I don’t know your name,” just keep going with the conversation. Because there is no point in trying to pull things out of a person. It will get them frustrated, it will get them upset, it will get you upset.

Ménard points out that while specific memories may no longer be viable, emotional memories may last until the very end, and should not be ignored:

The person may not recognize a person as being their son or daughter, but they will still feel happiness when they see that person because of the history they shared.
I have seen people nearly unresponsive in their beds, but upon hearing their spouse’s voice, their eyes open and they smile. That is their affective memory.

Photo: Mariano Cuajao

Victims of Alzheimer’s may also become physically abusive to those they formerly cared for. This impulsive behaviour is the disease, not its host. It is an uncontrollable impulsive reaction. Although it may seem a very personal, hurtful act, the recipient must remind themselves they have done nothing wrong. They are caring for someone losing their filter.

Ménard iterates that each person digests the realities of Alzheimer’s in their own way. Some may react with urgency, while other need time, and distance. Reactions of families and friends can be as varied as the effects of the disease itself:

For some children, accepting what’s coming creates too much anxiety, it’s too difficult. Sometimes it’s better to just deal with this moment. But, eventually, you have to express your emotions. Support groups can be extremely helpful navigating a person through the changes which lie ahead.

She also stresses the importance of asking for help before burnout takes a physical and emotional toll:

There are many more resources than there used to be. There’s the Alzheimer's Society of Canada, for instance. It is important for the child to understand the illness. Since you yourself are a child, and you may also have young children in your life, you have to be able to express what you’re living through, and the emotions which are being triggered; that can be very helpful. You have to ask for help.

Guilt. That emotion that often forbids one from finding their way out of the woods. It is all-powerful, and ironically had its profile created throughout our upbringing with our parents. And no one can trigger a more pointed guilt reflex in a child than their mother or father. There is often so much unresolved, so much unspoken. And, now, as a result of cognitive decline, that relationship may be beyond redemption.

Dion reassures families that that time has passed, and children can feel pride in refocusing their energies:

I think a good reminder and takeaway is for children who have parents who have Alzheimer's or any type of vascular dementia or Lewy Body, is to remember that, whatever choice you’re making, if it’s for your parent’s best interests, it’s always the right decision. And you have to understand that you have permission to live your life and raise your own children. It’s the natural cycle of life.

Being lost in the woods is also part of life's natural cycle. With dementia, that journey can take years to complete. Perhaps the challenge is not seeking a path out of the forest, but to try to find the right tools for long-term survival, as well as company for the journey ahead.

Wayne S. Grazio - Lost (in one's thoughts)

* Interview with Caroline Ménard conducted in French. I provided the English translation.

 

 

CTV News Channel's Culture Shock Panel

Here is a panel discussion on CTV News Channel with Todd van der Heyden, Hadiya Rodrigue, Jason Rockman, and me.
Topic includes:

• Male birth control pills are closer to becoming a reality
• Inner Circle - A dating app designed by a team of moms
• #DeleteFacebook : Is it time to dump the platform due to privacy concerns?

 

CTV NEWS CHANNEL CULTURE SHOCK PANEL - MARCH 22ND, 2018

Sgt. Pepper Puts a Spin on Connecting with Teen

We had a turntable in our basement, though I had no appreciation at the time of how inferior a machine it really was. It spun primarily Dr. Seuss's “Fox in Sox,” and its ‘B’ side, “Green Eggs and Ham.” Another favorite of mine was an LP of “Sneetches and Other Stories,” also by Seuss. The last track on the album - its “A Day In The Life” - told the story of Seuss's gender non-specific protagonist being stalked by a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them.
In 1979, I was not yet 8-years-old; the thought of being pursued by abandoned trousers was darn spooky, thank you.
My records were decorated with chalk doodles and tattooed with permanent needle drags. But, who cared? The machine, and the stories it told, were timeless companions...until, that summer, I was introduced to what true magic could be conjured by a vinyl record.

My family’s semi-detached cottage was in semi-industrial suburb on the island of Montreal. Several times each year, the six of us would pack ourselves - and our patience - into a midsize sedan and drive five or six hours west to visit my first-cousins in Toronto. The three Ontario brothers were, on average, ten years older than I. So, not only was I careful to pack a healthy imagination for a long drive sandwiched between by siblings in the back seat, I was also smuggling a healthy portion of hero worship for the visit that awaited me.

As with most homes that are not your own, my perception of the house in the borough of East York was that it was filled with cool stuff. There was the secret kitchen drawer filled with Twizzlers and marshmallows. There was an upright piano guarding a basement room whose floor was coated with orange shag carpeting. As if waiting for a scene from Studio 54, the matting continued up the side of a bar, whose melamine counter was illuminated with red and green pot lights which resembled oven burners inverted into the ceiling.

Trippy. Even for an 8-year-old.

Each of my cousins’ bedrooms had as its centerpiece a high-end hi-fi system, with hearty speakers of dark wood and black mesh hiding behind them whatever magic made the music.

The stereo offered only two sources of entertainment: an AM/FM radio...and “phono,” which channeled the turntable.

While I sat cross-legged on his bedroom floor (my 1979 joints were more forgiving than they have been in the 21st century), my cousin selected an album from the horizontal stack in his closet and said, “You should listen to this.”

He handed me a pair of headphones which were so large that, once they were clamped over your ears, one could not help but compare oneself to Princess Leia, whose brunette Kaiser rolls had become legendary two years earlier.

The ‘phones were umbilically connected to the amplifier by the granddaddy of electrical cords - a black, coiled cable long enough to remain attached to your headphones and still offer a freedom of movement which would compete with the cordless technology a decade into the future (until it became a knotted mess as a result of too much pacing and multi-tasking).

The headphone jack sparked and hummed as I connected it to its female counterpart - as though whatever was bottled inside the machine sensed its imminent release.

Moments later, as the needle skated along the first inches of vinyl groove, I was introduced to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

What a funny name, I thought.

Then, immersed in my first stereo recording experience, I was surrounded by an orchestra tuning up, followed by a rock band’s thirty-nine minute story which began “...20 Years Ago Today.”

Thirty-nine years later, my wife and I smuggled our thirteen-year-old son’s Christmas present out from the corner of our bedroom - an Audio-Technica turntable.

Everything old is new again.

In our basement, leaning up against books of decades ago by Ayn Rand and Stephen King (the former my wife’s, the latter mine), stood a dusty collection of mistreated vinyl: Faithful Seuss, Hitchcock stories, and Batman adventures. All of which were fettered with more scratches and speed-bump warps than any needle could handle.

The old gang was no match for a new phonograph.

This is why my son’s gift also included a certain album whose cover alone could captivate one for hours.

“Listen to this.”

Fate has its own sense of timing which often dabbles in the extremes of “perfect” and “horrible.” Ron Howard’s “Eight Days a Week,” was released in 2016. The following year, the world would celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fab Four’s seminal album. As a companion to the musical landmark, PBS broadcasted “Sgt. Pepper’s Musical Revolution.”

The documentary dissected the LP: how it was recorded, why is was recorded, what techniques were used, and how innovated the band - and especially George Martin - had to be to glean the sound they wanted from 1967 technology.

Perfect. Fate provided my eldest with a Sgt. Pepper master class during the run-up to Christmas.

 

Turntable by David Lenker

 

While my son’s gift was uncovering the revolutionary magic of analog needles and grooves, my gift was reliving my adolescence through the hums of base notes and the vibrations of rock-band-meets-orchestra working its way through my bedroom floor.

In his room, just below mine and my wife’s, the record was spun over and over, with brief pauses only to rotate from side A and back again.

Nostalgia is a creeping companion. It appears to some as re-creations of memories, to others as the mechanical wonder of a needle racing round and round through a vinyl canal, digging from them the ghosts of an English quartet.
I think this is where the past is a wink ahead of the future.

The past was never instantaneous. Anticipation and patience were things to be celebrated: the moments during which the record spun, but the needle still searched for a composition’s first notes; the slow-motion retreat of a tone arm back to its seated position awaiting whatever jewel may be encrusted in the B side of a classic work.

Digital is instant. Digital is right now. To lag is to fail; to wait is to waste. There is no anticipation in buffering, only aggravation.

A vinyl record is, like a child, is something which must be cared for; something which takes time to play itself through; something to discover.
The only thing which gives more pleasure than marvelling in discovery is being awed by rediscovery.

I will never relive my first encounter with Green Eggs, or Hitchcock, or the Batman. But I can, thankfully, revel in my reintroduction to Lovely Rita (where would I be without her?). All thanks to a little help from a revolving platform, a curious teenager, and that infamous band leader, Sergeant Pepper.

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How Talking About Mental Health for a Day Can Hopefully Last a Lot Longer

Bell Let’s Talk Day is a wonderful initiative. If for no other reason than it encourages the sharing of stories by people who would not otherwise be invited to a public platform.

That day has ended.

Tomorrow is February 1^st, and routine will command us once again: public transit commutes, workplace deadlines, supporting our children’s endeavors, grocery shopping and wishing we had one – just one – more hour with our blankets and pillows.

Tomorrow, the shine of feeling supportive, and the terror of public revelations, will have set ahead of the February sunrise.
364 days to go until Bell Let’s Talk Day 2019.

The real value in “raising awareness” about such mental health issues as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts is in hoping the glow of a 24-hour education has a long shelf life. How to you get more sustain out of the note?
That can only be achieved by individual mindfulness; something I have recently, and now seemingly constantly, begun working to improve and, though, as my psychologist says, “Perfection is not the expectation, it is a goal you are working towards over the period of a lifetime.”

While personal mindfulness can bring a type of inner peace, it can also help a person recognize how much they are clouded by their own judgment towards others.

Here are, in my opinion, the more important inner lessons to be learned from Bell Let’s Talk Day, which have nothing to do with texts and hashtags:

Compassion by Adam Freidin

• Don’t judge without context: You have no idea of the story behind a person’s behaviour.
  
  
• Don’t seek gossip: Where there is gossip, there is a victim.
  
  
• Mind your own business: Most things are irrelevant to your daily life. Unless it’s offered, it’s it not of your concern why someone was fired, why they called in sick, or why they were arguing on the phone.
  
  
• Mind your jealousy: Happiness is not out there, it is in here. Their car, or their house, or their vacation will not bring you peace. However, peace can be inches closer by being happy for others success.
  
  
• Be compassionate: Can you replace your frustration towards someone with feelings of compassion? Try to understand why they are behaving the way they are; are they frustrated? Scared? Stressed?
  
  
• Don’t assume: Nobody is who they seem. Just be grounded in who you are, and work from there.
  
  
• Slow down: Drive in the slow lane, sit quietly in a room, and put your fork down between bites. Appreciate this moment.
  
  
• Put yourself first: (Again, stealing this one from therapy) A “Yes” for someone else should be a “Yes” for you. If it’s not, say “No” and be comfortable with that decision.

You cannot control whether someone chooses to share their struggles, but you can quietly try to alleviate your own. The process is so slow, I know. Years, perhaps. If ever I come close, I’ll write about it.
Until then, I’ll keep reading books, and attending therapy, and stealing advice. And, on January 31^st 2018, I’ll share blog or two, and fire off some tweets, and wonder and hope whether someone out there actually had a year of feeling better.

 

Alive Magazine - "Uprooted! Supplanting what I thought I knew about plant-based diets"

What happens when a meat-loving father has his diet (and his morality) questioned by his animal-loving daughter? He gets a quick lesson in veganism. Click to read the full article at Alive.com:

Uprooted!

Supplanting what I thought I knew about plant-based diets

 

Photo Credit: Dale Crockett

 

 

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Truthbook Rather than Facebook Could Alleviate Holiday Depression

You're expecting 15 guests around your holiday table. Your “to do” list includes:

• Appetizers (after all -  the first guests arrive just after noon)
• Drinks for adults and children (alcoholic, non-alcoholic, regular, sugar-free, caffeine-free...)
• Main courses (which must accommodate as main 21st century dietary trends as possible)
• Sides (even though you delegated this to relatives, you leave nothing to chance)
• Deserts (indulgence, first and foremost)
• House cleaning (especially the bathrooms!)
• Wrapping token gifts (despite the agreement that there should be none; you shan't be alone this year in ignoring the rule.)

You could have asked for help, or simply accepted when it was offered, but for you, hosting is synonymous with accepting burden. The Food Network makes it look so easy. Besides, you have Friday off work (your first recess since Labor Day) that should be plenty of time.

For the 48 hours before the feast, not only are you struggling to execute, but you are also walking a tightrope threaded with the symptoms of anxiety: fatigue coupled with an elevated heart rate, impatience towards both the task you are racing to complete as well as towards your family members, distraction which just exacerbates inefficiency, and feelings of helplessness. Yet, somehow you manage to post a photo of a holiday decoration, or of a completed recipe, or of a wreath. Your post is tagged with "Can't wait's," and "So excited's," and "Only a few more hours!!!" Maybe you can hashtag your way to happiness? After all, it feels so good, being liked...being shared...being tagged. Online, who doesn't want to be "It"?  When praise is an addiction, its absence creates a vacuum filled by self-blame, self-criticism, and shame.

Frederico Morando - Internet Addiction

Those feelings are not criminal. The crime is that, with all that is shared in cyberspace, our true selves are tucked under the bed. The dopamine of "like" supercedes the bruising of being honest. 

Online does not tolerate "Can't handle it." Social media doesn't retweet "I wish I had more time." Facebook doesn't like "I'm not sure I'm ready for this." Your exhibition has become fake news.

Depression loves dishonesty, and online profiles reward cosmetics. That is why unearthing a peer willing to share stories of holiday stress is such a bijou. Anxiety is no longer a subject with a public face. When it is discussed, it is referred to as a disorder, a state which requires treatment.

Apprehension and loneliness during the holidays are not afflictions, they are symptoms of everyday humanity.

Perhaps a resolution this winter should be to begin sharing more than our Instagram lives; to not rely on Facebook posts to be pillars of a masquerade; but rather to use social media to provide social solace, and to seek out true connections within the ether.

 

 

 

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Alzheimer's and the Sandwich Generation

It was her makeup application that first made me think something was not right. Foundation that was a few millimeters short of her hairline, and a few more from her jaw.
Odd, I thought.
In hindsight, I recognize the irony—misapplied camouflage attempting to conceal a slow deterioration. A failed cover-up.
What gradually followed for my mother were lost words and mild disorientation.
Then, crisis.

As with addiction, when reaching out to someone with dementia one can only prod, and suggest, and hope. Often, however, there must be a bottoming out—a physical or psychological cellar, a darkness through which the ill cannot see without guidance and advocacy.
My mother fell into that cellar this past April.

The woman who had, after her own mother’s passing, assumed the role of family matriarch, was being crippled by the mysterious demons of dementia and delirium.
The transition was gradual: at first forgetfulness and disorientation, a solemn diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, and ultimately a terrifying psychosis triggered by the unforgiving combination of a urinary tract infection and slow cognitive decline.     

Two weeks earlier she was misplacing keys and struggling to comprehend Visa statements. Now, her apartment betrayed a scene of violence: a chair strewn in the hall, food and Corningware on the floor, and stories of strangers creeping up the back stairs where no stairs existed. To her uninitiated children, it was a psychological supernova; a terrifying introduction to the enigmatic and sometimes violent world of delirium.

Emergency Room, restraints, antibiotics, examinations, time.

Seven months later, the urgency is struggling to be replaced with acceptance, balanced with fatigue; the responsibility of a child towards their parent is wrestling with the responsibility of a father towards his children, and that of a grown adult granting himself the gift of self-care.

****

Jose Carlos - Alzheimer

ACCEPTING THE LOSS OF THE PERSON WHO WAS

In my experience, most adults have complicated histories with their parents, which inevitably colour any present day interactions. There are incidents which are both unforgiven and unforgotten. Our parents try to compensate for their own regrets by regularly offering course corrections on our own parenting voyage. Nearly every adult child / parent relationship is a full plate drizzled with appreciation and overbearance; with affection and exasperation.

Dementia unplugs the pool of personal history. All that was is drained away, one day at a time, and is replaced by a new iteration of a being who is not quite whole.
Reconciling one’s self with that, means learning to find an escape route through which you can permit yourself to be free of that history. It becomes a frank exercise in acceptance and objectivity: those arguments unresolved, and those wounds unhealed, can no longer be allowed to demand your energy, or your time, or your impatience.
Your parent, in almost every definable fashion, has become your child.

It suddenly became necessary for me to re-centre my thought process. I found it often useful to imagine my mother a stranger. How would I care for the elderly mother of a close friend? Which version of myself would I want to present to a septuagenarian in crisis on a street corner?
Those answers were simple: patience, kindness, and advocacy.
A relationship with acceptance, and absolutely no sense of a shared history.

Those touchstones of my relationship with my mother forty-five years in the making—my parents’ divorce and its consequences; personalities in conflict; disapproval and debate–must be buried in a grave alongside what used to be the healthy psychological profile of my aging parent.

Alzheimer’s and dementia: the ultimate arbitrators of any relationship.

 

Susan Sermoneta - L9999251

DAD, WHAT’S HAPPENING TO BUBBY?

As a child, I have become responsible for my mother’s well-being. As a parent, I am constantly standing on a teeter totter’s fulcrum, trying to credit my children’s intelligence by keeping them informed, while balancing that against the preservation of their memory of their grandmother who used to be well enough to host them for sleepovers and lead them on subway trips to see the Nutcracker.

Protectionism was my first instinct: euphemize recent stories of screaming, physical restraints, and terrifying hallucinations by replacing them with, “Bubby’s okay, and she sends her love.”

Much of that language trots alongside the timeline of the disease. During the first weeks, diagnoses are uncertain, and prognoses are hopeful. Time, though, slowly absorbs equivocation. Now, in early December, it is likely my mother is as improved as she will be. Throughout these months of treatment, bevies of conversations with physicians, nurses, mental health professionals, with my sister, my wife, and my mother’s lifelong friends, have helped me become comfortable with my own understanding of this disease. The result is my being more able, and more comfortable, being truthful and straightforward with my children.

They are old enough to understand that if I am not bringing them to visit their bubby, it is probably best they are not exposed to what lies on the far side of that hospital door.
My answers to their questions have finally become frank. We speak of depression, and dementia, and Alzheimer’s. At a psychologist’s request, we send videos of the grandchildren. I explain to my children that bubby becomes agitated and sad, and seeing them, even though a tablet’s screen, brings her great comfort.
It is one of the cruelest dimensions of this type of psychological disintegration: there is just enough residual intelligence and understanding for my mother to recognize the grandchildren, and to ask after them, and to be comforted by their image. However, enough logic and dimension has been stripped away that every day brings with it bursts of fear and anger, and outbursts of tears and confusion.

“How is Bubby?”
She’s not well. She gets very sad. But she misses you. She loves hearing stories about you, and seeing pictures of you.
And she probably won’t get better.

 

Susan Sermoneta - L9999251

GUILT VS SELF-CARE

Summers, for me, are a period of lighter workloads and more flexible hours. If there was good fortune to be found in what was transpiring with my mother, it is that the crisis was born in late April.
This resulted in my sister (a school teacher with similar flexibility during the summer months) and I were in a temporal position of being able to become full-time advocates during an emergent situation.
Each of us was on-call either daily or every second day at the hospital, asking questions of the medical staff or being bedside attempting to digest a prognosis. We were able to be present during her UTI diagnosis and treatment, and then throughout the decision-making and healing process of a double craniotomy. We were there to provide recognition and comfort when she was moved for a short period into a residence, and then researched on her behalf and advocated for her readmittance to the hospital when her cognitive and behavioral condition became once again unstable.

Summer’s end brought with it the fall of our flexibility, and the onset of not only real life (school for my sister and my children, and my more demanding workload), but also with it the complicated logistics of my mother no longer being at a residence down the block from me, but rather in a hospital which would demand extra hours of weekly commuting were I to attempt to maintain my previous visitation schedule.

I was also beginning to understand the toll of caregivers’ fatigue. I was short-tempered with my family, not sleeping properly and was slinking back to fast food and potato chips as dopamine delivery systems while I was stuck in rush hour traffic. (It became a ritual that I meet my sister outside her house prior to hospital visits with a McFlurry for each of us. What she never knew is that, when I was alone, I upsized my small to a medium. Here lies the confession, sis.) 

Therapy helped. Although guilt is the world’s most sensitive hair-trigger. Every call from the hospital elicits a churning of regret. My ability to overcome and assuage my guilt is directly related to the nature of the conversation.

The calls I have learned to most easily recover from are those from the nursing staff informing me my mother has fallen, but is unharmed (a several times weekly occurrence), or the necessity of hiring someone to care for her toenails, or the connection or disconnection of the television.

Conversely, guilt perverts itself into shame and sorrow when my mother calls asking if I have any room in my house, even for just a day or so, so she can live with her family while she obtains a new credit card and shops for a condo. The pleas are tear-filled. I can hear my mother fighting to sound as rational as possible, as though she were aware that her psychological health was tenuous, and under constant evaluation.
(Even in relaying these details, my guilt coerces me into justifying that, during those same conversations, she will confide in me that there are men chasing her, that she had been out for a drive earlier that day, and that she has been caring for her cat. All this while not realizing she has not left the hospital for months.)

Many people who visit a counselor for their marriage or other relationships are told: you cannot love others unless you learn to love yourself.
That seemed to me the mantra of ethereal hipsterism until a few months ago.
Now, I accept it as a truism.

My mother is in a place where she is being cared for. We are fortunate that, despite the nurse’s salary she earned throughout her career, she was a careful and steadfast financial planner and we are thankfully able to provide companions for her.
I am learning to give myself permission to be my own first priority. Who do I want to be? How do I want to feel? What kind of energy do I want to reserve for my own family?
Finding the answers to these questions is far easier that implementing their solutions.
My mother’s friends and more distant relatives, who are satellites to her predicament, grasp for news and explanations and understanding. Helplessness can be excruciating. I have learned to answer only when it is convenient for me, and only truthfully. I have accepted that, if my mother’s condition has worsened, or improved, or stabilized, it is not because of what I have not done. It is because this is the nature of this disease.
No amount of my attention can scrape away plaques and tangles, or frighten away hallucinations, or defeat depression.
Her bedside will welcome me when I am available, and will wait silently during my absence. All the while, dementia will creep in through the cracks, whether I am posted guard or not.

****

The gifts of a long-term illness such as Alzheimer’s are as few as the memories the disease leaves in its wake. However, its lessons can be ironically abundant and fruitful. Discovering those lessons, and drawing meaning from them, is the slog.
I relentlessly try to remind myself that each day offers rewards in some form. A hug from my children, my wife’s humor showing up in a text, driving in the middle lane while absorbing an hour of my favourite podcast.
Forever in the shadow of those moments lurks the awareness of the life my mother is “living,” a grey room in a geriatric hospital. Sadness. Fear. Loneliness. Confusion. The cruelty of a disease which strips away not only mental souvenirs, but with them wedges of personality and understanding.
Since beginning to speak aloud (and write) of these circumstances, I have met many peers and friends who have been affected by dementia in those people dear to them. Many who suffer from Alzheimer’s are left docile and accepting, even from within their cognitive blindness. Others, like my mother, are treated more cruelly. The remaining aspects of their personality are darker embers, sediments not deglazed.
Why? What determines one’s experience with dementia? Genetics? Personality profiles? Environment?

The only certainty seems to be all the things which will forever be uncertain. And acceptance seems to be the only state which allows us, the satellites to the disease, to continue to function from a place of patience, and gratitude for ourselves and for our own families.
It is a mental exercise of daily personal challenge and learning. Should I ever become afflicted by Alzheimer’s intellectual invasion, I hope that—at the very least—I can remember a life lived without regret.

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Suicide and Men at Risk, Part 1 - A Conversation with Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas

Dementia now Britain's biggest killer, overtaking heart disease for first time

Mysogyny and Harrasment Won't Disappear for at Least a Generation

The "heroic" takedown of Harvey Whinestein et al has perhaps destabilized the house of cards. However, only the most notorious kings and jesters have been toppled. A vast secret society of misogynists and harassers still support the lattice work, leaning shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot within the full house below.

At fault is not only the genetic nature of these misanthropic sexists, but also the unforgiving success equation which is the lifeblood of fruitful careers in media and the performance arts:

Sycophancy + Shame = the possibly of Unimaginable Success.

I have worked within electronic media for more than twenty-years. Prior to that, my focus was on becoming an actor. 
Ultimately, I have become comfortable in my resignation that success adopts many forms: family, a thriving household, friendship and personal health.
My chickens have been counted, and they are happily roosting in my nest woven of a mainstream career and upper middle-class life.

I still experience pangs of "what-ifs" and "if only's." However what I do not grieve is that pitiful feeling, that nausea, and that sense of helplessness which seems to permeate many workshops, auditions and readings which are "necessary" should one hope to achieve even the smallest success as an actor.

Audition by Dinah Sanders

How do the Whinesteins get away with it? Actors are trained to let them.

Like a cult, actors from the youngest of ages are taught to be in touch with emotion. Every workshop is a family. You must be free to share, hug, kiss, cry, laugh, and bare yourself to strangers. Each class incorporates trust exercises: stand on a window ledge, close your eyes and fall into the arms of your "partner" - i.e. the person you met twelve minutes ago.
Stand face-to-face with your acting partner and recite your first thought. Should that thought be, "Your body is beautiful," it behooves you to say it, lest you allow dishonestly to encumber your acting. Should your partner respond with, "Don't say that to me," they are close-minded, and perhaps not prepared for the emotional grind of Hollywood.
Most of all, when improvising with a fellow actor, the golden rule is:

NEVER...SAY...NO.

Year after year, audition after audition, hundreds of times over, an actor continues to "hone his or her craft," and works with "wonderful people." Self-doubt is something one must overcome if you are to "make it." Distrust must be banished and replaced with a communistic sense of belonging, accessible at a moment's notice in the event one is called upon to audition a death scene, or love scene...or sex scene.

With millions of actors all pining for the peak of the pyramid, it becomes an excavation of one's own pride and self-worth to determine: what are you willing to do that others may not.

In Season 4 of "Game of Thrones," Emilia Clarke added a "No Nudity" clause to her contract. 
After three years on the show, she decided enough was enough. She had also accumulated enough clout to be able to dictate terms.
Imagine being an actress, a decade in to auditions, workshops, and feather-duster commercials being offered a lead role on a HBO series.

   "You'll have to be naked a lot," the producer says. "You're a beautiful girl, and we're going to showcase you and your beauty."

Who would say no? Especially realizing with absolute certainty that turning down an opportunity which presents itself literally once in one's lifetime may mean a career in the service industry versus one in Hollywood.
Add, now, the pressure of thousands of actresses pushing against the door, hoping your weakness (i.e., self-worth) results in just one more call back for a girl ready to bare it all, because, in acting, they were taught, you NEVER...SAY...NO.

Clarke has since reversed her no nudity clause. More importantly, she chose to reverse it. Why? Because she can. Because her capacity to earn a profit for a production company empowers her with enough clout to decide whether to flaunt her body.

I have auditioned for weird agents, one of whom asked me to remove my shirt for my audition, another who asked me to read for him - from a soft-porn script. After both instances I felt queasy. Worse, I felt worthless for feeling queasy. I guess I just don't have the stuff, I told myself.
It was possible I didn't have the talent, or the opportunity, or the grit.
None of that changes the fact that these guys are creeps. And, these were two agents from my hometown, whose names were atop an agent search list. Why?

NO ONE...EVER...SAYS...NO.

Your job is to tell producers how wonderful the project is, how lucky you are to be attached to a project, and then to thank them for the opportunity.

    "I'd rather not take off my shirt."

Thank you for coming.

    "I'd rather not do nude scenes."

You're in the wrong business.

    "You won't believe what Harvey did to me."

Oh, that's just Harvey being Harvey.

Fall Town Hall 2012-010 by Penn State

Local radio and television - which has been vocation for more that twenty years - does not fare much better. Scantily-clad pinups on walls, Maxim covers as computer wallpaper, and boys-being-boys whistling at waitresses and female co-workers over beers after work are still not unusual.
Want to be an anchor, or bureau chief, or travel with the team? Learn to take a joke; learn to look the other way; MAN UP.

    "This is a tough business."

It's not, actually. I imagine being an EMT is a touch business. Media is a competitive business, not a tough one. 
Media, like acting, offers the promise of glamor and stardom (even within a local framework). Among those competing for positions in front of a camera or a microphone (and often even for the higher profile positions behind the scenes), jealousy and politics play crucial roles. It is a daily audition.

Even in 2017, a twenty-four year old intern is not going to ask his fifty-year-old boss to scrub the office of offending materials. An intern won't tell his boss his jokes aren't funny. An intern won't tell his boss that, perhaps, the waitress doesn't appreciate being whistled at.

Just ask Billy Bush.

Whinstein may have regrets, but the actor on his or her way to an audition is probably still willing to do (almost) anything for a career like Gwyneth Paltrow's.
A young reporter will probably still do (almost) anything to cover the Red Carpet.

It's not the house of cards that needs toppling, it is the legs of the table supporting the stack of knaves which needs reinforcement, and assurances that they can walk alone, and still consider themselves successful. 

Who’s the Boss? (Could it be I’m learning responsibility from them??)

 

Who’s the Boss?

(Could it be I’m learning responsibility from them??)

Teaching your children responsibility is one of the backbones of parenting. Why, then, is it so difficult to know how much is too much, and how soon is too soon? Sometimes the hardest thing for an adult to do is to let their child grow up.

Tips for Transitioning Your Child to High School

On BT Montreal, we discuss some tips for helping your pre-teen transition from elementary school to high school.
This can be a challenge for both parents and children who may be nervous and concerned for what lies ahead :

 

Tips for Transitioning Your Child to High School