5/10/2014 Sexuality and Sex, And Caregiving | Psychology Today

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By Cris Mazza
It was time for in-home assistance. Our 94-year-old father could not go on
cooking and cleaning dishes, doing laundry, and overseeing medicines
for our 89-year-old mother who had stopped managing any of these, little
by little, over the past six months.
Three of us had been brought together from various distant locations to
our childhood home for this task. Stymied by aphasia difficulty
processing language, both comprehending what is said to her as well as
locating the right words and grammar to express what she is thinking
our mother didnt fully understand what the in-home care professionals
seated on her living room sofa were saying, but our mothers expressions
showed doubt, apprehension, and sorrow. There seemed no effective
way to help her accept how she would benefit from this. But this worked,
as well as anything was going to:
Mom, this is for Dad. He needs help. He cant do everything. We have to
help him.
Yes. True. He does too much. Too much for him.

There are gendered nuances in the roles we learn from our mothers. My
mother, besides having been a physical education coach and then
elementary teacher, was a wife and mother of five, starting in the early
Sexuality and Sex, And Caregiving
Insidious lessons about sexuality growing up can define a caregiver later on.
Published on April 29, 2014 by Meredith Resnick, L.C.S.W. in More Than Caregiving
Love and Sex and Growing Up. This was the title of a popular book when I was a kid. But what do love
and sex mean once someone has grown? Once someone has become a caregiver? And what did that
caregiver learn about love and sex and growing up by watching the model her own now
elderly parents provided? This is the topic Cris Mazza addresses in the following essay.
Cris Mazzas newest title is a real-time memoir titled Something Wrong With Her . She has sixteen
other titles including Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, Waterbaby, Trickle-Down Timeline, and Is It
Sexual Harassment Yet? Her first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for
book-length fiction. Mazza has co-edited three anthologies, most recently Men Undressed: Women
Writers on the Male Sexual Experience. In addition to fiction, Mazza has authored an earlier collection of
personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Currently living 50 miles west of Chicago, she is
a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She can be found online
at www.cris-mazza.com
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50s: ostensibly a familial caregiver finding satisfaction only (or mostly) in
what she can do (or what she can sacrifice) to assist, assuage or fulfill
another. Caregiving roles vary household, as family caretaker, and,
also rarely discussed, sexual. As her daughter, I learned from my mother.
I cannot trace, prove or even claim a cause-and-effect, but I became a
sexual caregiver.
You dont ask a man to do what will please you. Hes supposed to know
and give it to you. Or he doesnt. Or wont. (Know. Or give it to you.) But
regardless, you can be happy and complete anticipating what he wants
and giving him what he needs.
An outdated piece of subliminal (or concrete) marriage advice? No. My
sex life. My own recommendation to myself.
Giving a man what he needed for his sexual ego, and being desired by a
man (or chosen) to fulfill those needs that was my ego. There was
noself-esteem attached to whether or not I was satisfied, (whatever that
meant).
Women writing frankly about their sexual experiences had broken open
before I lost my virginity. Mostly they were confessing their hunger, their
desires, their means of satisfying themselves. No writer that I came across
expressed disillusionment, lack of sensation, minimal arousal, or pain.
Those were my experiences. If I wrote about those, I didnt do it with the
kind of frank, confessional first-person character stand-in that had caught
the literary worlds attention in Fear of Flying. My first novel-character
was the invention of a loner artist (himself an invention by the author), a
fantasy girlfriend who did not have orgasms (but at least did not feel pain)
because he couldnt imagine what that would be like for her. The mans
imagination dictated the womans experience. I did not immediately realize
the full implication of what I had done with that trope.
Men (the plural word seems too populated; the number was under five)
confessed, both knowingly and subliminally, their insecurities
andfantasies to me. I did my best to fulfill them. I was rewarded
with gratitude. Their astonished and satiated eyes. A few of them held my
hand or strapped an arm around me on the sofa while watching a movie.
It was not until the next wave of womens confessional writing about sex,
starting in the late 90s, that I turned my gaze from literary representations
to my secret self: the one who felt little except friction (or pain), who did
not know what sexual hunger might be like, who was still (although much
less often) performing sexual needs for a man with no reciprocation, no
inquiry (or request) by either of us regarding what I might like. Perhaps
neither of us could imagine it.
But I was suddenly aware of the void in my life as it compared to the
ecstasies being delivered in younger womens fiction and (by then)
memoirs. I wondered why. There was something wrong with me. I began
to feel mourning for the missing part of my life. But this was grief to be
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ashamed of, because to me its (possible) resolution is not an entitlement.

Back at my parents house, five of us (counting various spouses) were
using our childhood bathroom, two in sleeping bags on the floor, my
father back in the full-sized (not queen or king) bed hed shared with our
mother for over 50 years, but where now her restless sleep and nocturnal
rips to the bathroom keep him awake.
She gets up to sit with her iPad and play solitaire and gin rummy. Until she
falls sideways, asleep again. Our father trying to distract his unease by
bending over the always-present jigsaw puzzle spread on his former
bridge table. Meanwhile, over a marinara sauce she was preparing for
our parents supper, my sister wept quietly because she couldnt alleviate
her husbands travel frustrations while we grappled with the home-care
company interviews, visits from nurses and physical therapists, plus our
parents anxieties.
My other sister sat with our mother on the loveseat, backlit by a picture
window. Mom, now awake, leaning close. Mom, are you ever sad?
Mom turns away to look out the window.
A lot.
My sister thinks for a moment, then says, What would make you
happier?
Not much of a pause this time, but our mother does need to work to turn
her perspective into language. Sell this house. Move to a place with help.
Nearer you. But Dad is happy here.
Yet the only time I saw her smile on this visit was as she lay in her bed
and my father bent over her to kiss her goodnight.
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