Caring for my mother and being pro-life

With help from my husband and my brother and some hired CNAs, I care for my 95-year-old mother in an apartment connected to our house.  Several times a day, I climb the stairs and offer her juice, tea, help getting to the bathroom, a few tunes on the piano, a movie.   I help her get up in the morning and I help her get to bed at night.

Mom can't do anything for herself except eat. She needs help dressing, bathing.  She always knows who I am, but doesn't really know where she is.  "There are a lot of bathrooms here," she said today as she entered the bathroom, one of many encounters that I guess she was adding up in her head.

I love caring for her.  She is so completely helpless, and little things make her so happy.  "Oh, Andrea!" she will say, "you are a genius!"  This is because I put lotion on her back.  This very low bar for genius-hood is most pleasing.

Caring for her also helps me think:  "What is the purpose of life, really?"  I tend to think the purpose is to Accomplish Things, that the more I Accomplish the more I am worth.  No Accomplishments = No Worth.

Mom accomplishes exactly nothing.  Yet I know that putting time and effort into her comfort is not wasted.  Life itself is its own reason for being, its own goodness.

I have always believed this.  That is why I am pro-life.  The unborn baby who is deformed, who has Down's syndrome, has just as much worth as my 95-year-old mother, and just as much worth as I, Mrs. Accomplishment, have.  I recoil at the thought of aborting a fetus because of these defects, a particularly chilling form of eugenics.

But even though I have always believed it, I have never really lived it before.  While holding pro-life views, I was busy rating people, including myself, for their level of accomplishment.  "We got a lot done!" was--and remains--my favorite sentence.

I have to let go of that with Mom.   I have to live a pro-life life.  Otherwise, the time spent caring for her makes no sense.  When you care for a baby, you think rosy thoughts about the investment you are making in its future.  Not so with a 95-year-old.

To care for my mother is to invest in life itself, in love, pure and simple.  It brings me great joy.