Keep Me in Your Heart for a While, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

October 2, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 1 Comment

Human society is set up along certain assumptions.

Assumption #1:  We are mammals.

Assumption #2:  We will breed.

Assumption #3:  Once we have bred, we will stay together in groups.

Assumption #4:  Each group (or “family”) will take care of other members within the group.  Adults will take care of infants and young children.  Younger adults will care for the sick and the aged.

From the beginning of human-kind up until about 50 years ago (more or less), these assumptions worked pretty well.  Not perfectly, and not for everybody, but pretty well.  Almost everyone got married and had a few kids, and there were convents or monasteries or other kinds of secret societies for the queer or the widowed.

Today, not so much.

Romantic love as a basis for marriage is a relatively new idea.  Marriage, as an institution, was invented as a way to pass down property.  People with money and/or power arranged marriages to maintain or increase their money and power.  People without either one still had sex and still had children, but they didn’t get a ceremony.

As Aziz Ansari noted in his book, Modern Romance (which is really good), it wasn’t that long ago that Americans pretty much married people in their own neighborhoods.  There wasn’t a popular fantasy of searching the world for one’s soulmate.  Instead, everyone found someone that he or she liked well enough, got married and, with luck, lived happily (or at least contentedly) ever after.

(Note:  It’s also true that there was a lot of brutality and abuse and self-deception going on.  I’m not trying to trivialize that.  But it’s not what this column is about).

Today, with more and more people going to college, and getting jobs in places far from where they were raised, many of us marry someone with a different hometown, and we settle in cities far away from our parents and other relatives.  Many of us never get married, but still live far away from the rest of our families.

Which is fine.  I love living in New York, where I can do things I enjoy in a way that I enjoy.  I think it’s a terrific place to meet people, raise children, and find meaningful work.  Except …

My father played by the rules.  He married and raised a family.  He was there for his first wife when she died of cancer and he was there for his second wife, nearly thirty years later, when she died of cancer.

When my father was ill, he was thousands of miles away from where I was raised, and from where I then lived.  It was difficult for me to get to him in an emergency.

There should have been someone there for him.  I did my best, but even under the best of circumstances, it took me at least a day to get to him.

With higher education and (middle-class) women working outside the home (because poor women have always had jobs), we are more and more spread out from our biological families.  With the increase in income inequality, more and more us spend all of our time at jobs, not to get rich but to keep a job that might let us pay the bills.

And for those of us who never married, or are divorced or widowed, that’s a problem.

I come from a place of privilege here.  I could afford to spend weeks with my father when he was ill.  I could afford to devote myself to my husband when he was ill.  I don’t know what we would have done if I had to choose between paying my rent and taking care of my loved ones.  My relationships with my sick relatives wasn’t questioned because I was part of a “family” as defined by Kim Davis and her ilk (because, at least on the outside, my relationships fit into that Biblical facade).

Now I live alone.  My son (the genius) lives on the other coast.  My sister lives across the country.  Like the people in the first link, there is no one near me with the authority to make medical decisions in case I’m incapacitated.

I have a lot of friends in the same situation.  I try to do right by them, to pick them up from the doctor’s office if they had anesthesia, or let them use me as their emergency contact.  I am blessed that they will do the same for me.

But I don’t ask them to make life-or-death decisions about me in case that comes up.  I wouldn’t want to put that responsibility on them.  They don’t ask me, either.

It shouldn’t have to be this difficult.

We are family.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, is grateful that, so far, she’s in decent health.  However, if you should find her when she is in the hospital and unconscious, she wants to be kept alive if she is aware enough to enjoy watching a movie on televison.  Otherwise, you can pull the plug.