ON TECHNOLOGY, TRAUMA AND COUSINS

Events List as End! Check it out!

I’m sorry, but I’ve got nothing. Mom fractured her neck a month ago, and I can’t figure out how to help her. She lives three and a half hours away. She has the VNA and various therapists to support her, but that will end soon. Insurance only pays for so much. She’s upset that the PT documented that she asked them to take out the garbage, but I’m all for that because it means she needs help with the “tasks of daily living,” which means she might qualify for help a bit longer.

Meanwhile, she has doctor’s appointments to get to, and medications she needs delivered (but CVS requires an account to do that, which you set up via a link on your phone, but she’s stumped by her cellphone). There are phone calls about changing her neck brace and who can do it and who can’t and how often it needs to be done. There are different messages about procedure and timing from the surgeon and from the VNA and from the clinic where she got the brace fitted. Can one person do it or does it need to be two? If it’s two, insurance won’t pay for that.

Then there was the day a neighbor was supposed to take her to an appointment, and they got their times crossed. Mom went with someone else, a last-minute good Samaritan, but I got the phone call that she was missing. Yesterday, the VNA nurse called because she couldn’t reach mom all week. The power was out from the storm, and mom had been staying with her cousin. This morning, she got the unwelcome news that the town taxi service is out of business. Now I need to schedule Ubers for her to get to the hospital and back for tests. Getting her an Uber ride means I have to put in a phone number, but …cellphone. We’ve reviewed and reviewed, but she doesn’t practice or use it, so it doesn’t stick.

She thinks she needs to be in a place with more full-time care (she’s right!) but doesn’t want to deal with finding one or moving (who does?); meanwhile, my cousin Joanna has ended up caring for my mother as well as her own father, something she surely didn’t expect to take on, and has no obligation to do.

I’ve been having this conversation with various friends, and one said to me, “That’s what family is for.” I admit I was stunned. First, it’s not “family,” it’s women, usually, who are caretakers, who are, as Jane Gross writes in A Bittersweet Season, “slumped over the steering wheel, sobbing. Across America, in parking lots like this one, middle-aged daughters do this all the time.” And second, the weight of it is never equally distributed. One friend lives 3,300 miles from her mother. Her sister does the work. My husband’s sister cared for their mother. Another friend moved into her father’s triplex and cared for him and her mother intensively during their last years, while her three siblings came by once in a while. My female cousin is doing the heavy lifting for me.

Also, the culture has changed in ways that are profoundly challenging for older people, especially someone like my mom who hasn’t kept up with technology. She can’t set up online accounts or access them if they require multifactor authentication because switching screens on her computer or (again) figuring out the cellphone is too complex.

I’m making her sound like a dolt. She’s not. She’s got a master’s degree and has lately been reading Kant. For fun. But tech is a different kind of thinking—a kind that’s not always logical to me, for all of Silicon Valley’s “user-friendly” BS. User manual, anyone? I still can’t get music to play on my new Honda from my phone—except for the one song I initially downloaded just after I bought the car last month. In 10 years, Aretha Franklin’s “Baby, I Love You” may still be the only one I can listen to.

Thankfully, mom is in her Uber headed home, and I’m learning the value of excessive tipping. Meanwhile, if you see a woman in a parked car crying, be kind to her. It could be me, or my exhausted cousin Joanna, whom I so appreciate and can never repay. I would then ask you to go home and write your state legislator—and talk to your husbands and boyfriends—and ask them to think about ways we can support our elders and their caretakers. Even if you don’t need it now, someone in your family someday will.

Thanks for reading.

Events:

Wednesdays in 2026 - Norwalk Poets & Writers Nights continue in the new year on 3/4 and 4/8! Join Norwalk Poet Laureate Katie Schneider for Norwalk Poets & Writers Nights featuring screenwriter/fiction writer fiction writer T.E. Hahn, and a very special lineup including yours truly for a Poetry Month Celebration!

Thursday, March 26, 6:30 PM, Norwalk Public Library: Sharbari Ahmed and Samantha Keller talk international literature—Africa and South Asia—as well as about family and race and mothering. (I host! Come join me.)

Saturday, March 28, 6 PM, The Sparkle Bookstore, Sparkill, New York (across the river!): Poetry Workshop on writing prose poems and then a celebration of my new book, The Sky Weeps With Us. Sign up here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sparklers-prose-poetry-with-laurel-peterson-tickets-1979222533878

Sunday, April 12, 2 – 4 PM, Norwalk Public Library: Poet Laureate Emeriti book celebration for Bill Hayden’s anthology, and my new book The Sky Weeps With Us. Come join us for cookies, camaraderie and great poems from Norwalk!

Wednesday, April 15, 2025, 6:30 PM Norwalk Public Library: Jerry Johnson and Katie Schneider read from their work and talk about what it means to be a writer, how they got started, self-publishing and more! (I host! Come join me.)