Life Isn't Fair

Answering a question from a fellow writer

Dear Nadia,

How do I remain a compassionate caregiver for my 89 year old mother who never once (not once) cared for me when I was ill, or broken-hearted, or bereft? How do I continue to spend 45 hours a week making sure that she is treated with dignity and decency by a horrible, elderly-hating Medicaid system that is just waiting for her to die and decrease the surplus population? How do I not self-medicate in my usual loathsome ways when she calls me fourteen times a day, and her Medicaid care manager, ten? How do I do this while getting older myself?

Where is God in all this?

Asking for a friend. 🙏🏻x

Dear Elissa,

When I was a kid - the youngest of three - I was known to shout “that’s not fair!” when my older siblings got to do something cool that I wasn’t allowed to do.

My mother’s response was always the same: “Nadia, LIFE isn’t fair”. An answer that sounds cruelly unsatisfying in a 8 year old’s ears.

But she was right. Life isn’t fair, which still makes me want to pound my raging little fists into a 1970s Formica table.

It’s true, Elissa. The imbalance of care you are carrying is, in no ways, fair.

But maybe it’s helpful to remember how unfairness cuts in more ways than one.

It is also not fair that you have the therapy hours, the tedious self-awareness, the creative life, and the long-term reciprocal love that perhaps your mother never had.

I’ve found myself thinking about you a lot over the last few days. I picture you as a girl; bereft, broken, unmothered in any satisfying sense of the word. And I keep wondering what river of circumstance and serendipity carried you all the way from there to here, from then to now, from her to you.

You asked me how do you keep giving care to an elderly mother who never once gave it to you, but I’ve been wondering how the hell you’ve ALREADY been doing it.

What unlikely waters can carry an ill-prepared girl that far?

From unmothered girl to imperfect caretaker.

Those waters, Elissa, are God’s resistless grace.

Dark and churning, calm and pitying.

A power higher.

Doing for us what could never happen if left to bootstraps and good character.

There is no fair trade between deserving and receiving to be had in this life (which feels inexcusable), but what there is instead, is so much grace.

The un-earnable, unbidden, unnoticed gifts of grace have somehow carried you here, and they will somehow carry you on.

When I was in labor with my son, I fought every growing wave of pain, my body tightened against each contraction trying foolishly to stop what cannot be stopped. Until finally I surrendered. I lay in a warm bathtub and with each contraction, I whispered to myself, “float”. I closed my eyes and surrendered, allowing my laboring body to buoy in the water until the pain subsided. Because you can’t float if you’re fighting.

So, Elissa, maybe the answer to both your questions of HOW do I do this and WHERE is God are the same: in the waters. Carrying us through girlhood and grief, resentment and redemption, Medicaid and mothering, recovery and dishes.

If it helps, please know that I too am trying to float more and fight less. And when that fails, I sometimes pound my now arthritic fists on the table. (But Formica, God bless, is nowhere in sight).

Love,

Nadia

Elissa Altman is an award winning writer. She takes on herself, her family, the creative life and (delightfully)….cooking. Her latest book, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create is available now. You can find here her on Substack at Poor Man's Feast.

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