The missing men of care work
On being a New Jersey stereotype
While reading White Working Class, I made a note to myself to ask my dad how exactly it is that he and my mother almost bought a junkyard.
My father is a cross between an absent minded professor and Mr. Rogers. He spends his days managing details of a cosmology project. It’s hard to believe he once obtained the permits and licenses required to run a salvage company.
This happened when I was a chubby, awkward middle schooler, so while I was ostensibly there for a lot of this, I was preoccupied.
Before I got a chance to ask, he texted me first. My Uncle Joe had died.
If any of my childhood friends are reading this, they’re wondering which Uncle Joe? While “uncle” narrows it down a bit, as in not my Aunt Joe or Aunt Joanne, there are still several potential Joes, not all of whom are technically my uncles. They are great uncles, cousins too old to be cousins, and friends who are basically family.
But this is one of my family tree Uncle Joes. The one who owned the junkyard. Who ended up selling it to another Uncle Joe.
I immediately text my cousin (not my actual cousin) Joe (also not his actual name, but we call him Joe) to express my condolences.
The death is not a surprise to any of us, because his wife died not long ago and we all knew he couldn’t live without her.
The thing is, the Uncle Joe who just died could, technically, live without my Aunt Dottie.
Dottie, on the other hand, could not have lived without Joe or someone else managing her care for the past several decades.
As a child, my dad and I would go visit her in the hospital. In my memory she was in the ICU for a very long time, followed by a very long stay in the regular part of the hospital, with fewer tubes. In my memory we went every night.
When I think of her, be it in 1997 or 2017, she is accompanied by the translucent coil that connects her to an oxygen tank.
I thought they were rich because they had a house where you could walk to the beach, instead of having to ride your bike. They lived in a house that was an actual house and not a summer bungalow that had been made into a year-round house by virtue of adding some sort of heating.
They also had an in-ground pool and a refrigerator in the garage stocked with Yoohoo and all the other things my mother didn’t buy.
I loved visiting the junkyard nearly as much as I loved going to their house. Their toy poodle would be there in the office, tiny bows in her hair. Dottie would crack jokes with my parents while Joe would give me candy and take me out to watch things get smashed.
Later, my understanding of “rich” expanded to include private jets, a household staff, and family compounds.
I want to call my dad and ask if they had formica countertops, but it seems like today isn’t the right time to ask that sort of thing.
The surgery that had saved her life hadn’t been covered by insurance and it’s a sum that seems astronomical even now.
The last time I saw Joe, Dottie was still alive. A handful of family was over to celebrate a birthday. They were force feeding us deli meat and cheese while not actually touching it themselves. There were large quantities of wine which may or may not have come out of a box or a jug. The home health aide was in and out.
Dottie joked about how the OJ Simpson trial had kept her sane while stuck in the hospital for so long. Now she had the TV and the internet and an ipad full of games and she was still bored out of her mind. She missed their old house in Florida, which had good people watching opportunities. They’d just moved back to NJ and she was already on the verge of naming the deer outside her new tract house.
Joe took me on a tour of the house, proudly showing me how he’d cleverly renovated the bathroom to make it accessible for the wheelchair that was out of sight that day.
Standing in the bathroom, he told me how all those years he’d been busy running the junkyard, he’d had no idea what Dottie was doing in the office. He trusted her to balance the books and worry about the details. It was she who’d earned the real money with her investments.
The men in my family never seem to hesitate when someone needs help.
They figure it out and they don’t talk about it, even if it’s not exactly a secret. We all knew how physically frail Dottie was. We knew that all the things needing to get done got done.
No family has only one person who requires care, although sometimes we only have one person in a given moment. The other Uncle Joes have paid off medical bills, tuition bills, credit card debt. They made sure houses were cleaned and maintained. They took each other in and even bought houses for relatives when they could figure out a way to swing the extra mortgage.
It wasn’t all bill paying and fixing leaks. When there was money to pay for it, they brought in aides and cleaners. It still got done when there wasn’t money.
A bachelor uncle long relied on significant supported from a brother, but once he couldn’t shower or feed himself an aunt stepped in to do that sort of intimate care.
But they didn’t pass things off on a sister when it was their kid or their wife.
Do the caregivers in your life also look like a casting call for the Sopranos?
In Amateur, Thomas Page McBee mentions how the ways his mother allowed him to care for her changed when he began living openly as a man. He adapted. He was there for her.
Where are the men who provide care? They’re right here. They’ve always been here.
Hubby is in Hospice care here at home, and his last 2 CNA's have been men! I am so thankful for them.