WHY IS GRANDMA NAKED? Caring for Your Aging Parent

In this humorous self-help book, award-winning journalist and attorney Ellen Pober Rittberg serves as a guide and cheerleader to family members who undertake to care for their elderly parents.  Sharing the stresses and satisfactions when caring for her aging mother, Rittberg uses comical chapter headings such as:

• Be The Alpha Dog

• Boundaries? Huh? Your Aging Parent Has None

• Your Parent May Develop Sticky Fingers

• JEOPARDY! (why elderly parents need their favorite show even when they can't answer any of the questions)

Rittberg employs an upbeat breezy, can-do tone. She details common scenarios and techniques she used when caring for her aging parent at home, such as:

•  Toilet training your senior parents using the "rump on the hump" technique when incontinence is an issue

• Taking away car keys before reading about a parent in a newspaper crime blotter

• Their hobby of digging deep into their nostrils and other recesses

• Staying awake while hearing the nineteenth retelling of childhood stories from your parent with dementia

• Playing matchmaker to hired caregivers

• Avoiding shopping trips turning into shoplifting trips

• Understanding declining parents' sometimes hilarious fantasies and delusions.

Rittberg shares with readers the life-changing, humbling and deeply rewarding benefits of caring for elderly parents and knows a good belly laugh is the best stress reliever.

ON PARENTS’ BODIES AND BODILY FUNCTIONS :      

To your parent, the human nostril is not something to be wiped periodically. It is now a top Travel and Leisure destination. If you’ve previously been unsure which human body part is connected to what other body part, wonder no more! Instead, spend a few moments observing Dad practicing The Scientific Method. (Remember middle school science class where you learned to formulate a hypothesis, test it out and then come to a conclusion?) Your parent’s conclusion is they like having their fingers up there!

Putting an absurd spin on this: maybe they just want to give their fingers a workout. Consider their behavior a variant form of chair yoga. Or think of your parent as a modern-day John Rambo in First Blood. He is merely thinking up makeshift ways to cause pain to himself and extreme discomfort to others using what is the most primitive but effective tool known to man: a finger.

ON WHY AGING PARENTS ARE OBSESSED WITH JEOPARDY:

Maybe it has something to do with the blissed-out set, all plexiglass and bright that puts them in a state of blissed-out-ed-ness. (Ditto for Wheel of Fortune.) Because Mom felt so connected to Alex Trebek and Jeopardy!, I saw an opening of sorts even though she was quite declined. We’d discuss the color of Alex Trebek’s tie and how his tie coordinated with his suit. We noticed when he had his hand in a cast.(And it made him all the more relatable to Mom, what with her recent fall.)

ON DECLINING PARENT’S INABILITY TO SEPARATE REALITY FROM T.V

Through time, your parents’ ability to separate their lives from the lives of the people on television disappears. Mom had a minor obsession with the man in the Trivago commercial. To hear her tell it, she had all the inside dirt on Trivago Guy. Mom told my son that when they first hired the Trivago Guy, he didn’t look very clean-cut, but then they gave him a makeover and tidied him up. 

Mom also enjoyed analyzing (what she believed was) the producer’s clever attempts at disguising the Proressive Insurance Lady’s expanding girth, which Mom attributed to Progressive Insurance Woman’s pregnancy. That set me to wondering why the producer had chosen to attire Progressive Insurance Lady all in white, which is not a color that is good at disguising girth. That I spent time mulling over this, and occasionally still do, concerns me greatly.

ON INCONTINENCE:

Assuming your parents can hold it in long enough to get to the bathroom and want to hold it in, their goal (and yours) is to get there in time for the rump to hit the toilet seat bump. That our parents succeed in getting to the bathroom on time or at least giving it that old college try is all that matters. And please, don’t hold back if your parents need encouragement. Remind them about The Little Engine That Could. Clap. Cheer. Be over the top. Give them gold stars. And enjoy this period while it lasts. Because it won’t last. It’s like bird migration. Here today, gone tomorrow.

35 Things Your Teen Won't Tell You, So I Will (Good Things to Know)

Any parent of a teenager who would like pragmatic tips on how to build a positive relationship with their child should read this book. Parents of teens know that in today's environment, being a good parent is a greater challenge than ever.

In 35 Things Your Teen Won't Tell You, So I Will, Ellen Pober Rittberg offers insight on how to connect, react, instill responsibility, and even discipline your teen to help foster a positive parent-child relationship.

This pragmatic yet humorous insight includes:

• Discussing the issue of partying when an adult isn't home

• Subsidizing your teen at your own peril

• Asking yourself, To buy a car or not to buy a car (that is the question)

• Helping your teen understand the importance of punching the clock

• Addressing beer and hard liquor, the unseen enemy

He is Walking Wider

Ellen’s full-length book of poetry, He Is Walking Wider, was just published by Kelsay Books!
Read the most recent reviews below. Stay tuned for more!

There is something very New York about this fine collection by Ellen Pober Rittberg. There’s humor and social witness. But what sticks is the quickness of perception—particularly in the quirky and wise observations the poet draws from the imposing plethora of experience that life in a busy metropolis can be. Koan-like images are massaged out of the cacophony that only a tried and true denizen of New York can execute, one who pays close attention to everything while seeming to not pay any attention. In “Subway Poses,” for example, Rittberg delivers incisive snapshots gathered with a “street-smart” aplomb. This imagistic skill—the ability to find character in the smallest perceptual detail—takes on its truest force in her intimate family poems. Poems for father, mother, child, all are imbued an emotional honesty and fullness cannot fail to win the willing reader’s heart.

- George Wallace, Writer in Residence, Walt Whitman Birthplace

In He Is Walking Wider, Ellen Rittberg’s inventive new collection of poems, we get a marvelous array of sensations and perspectives, a big Whitman spirit in short Creeley lines. In fresh, vital language, the poems explore passages from one stage to another, one era to another. Something’s lost, Rittberg seems to say, but something’s gained. In the collection’s most recent poem, the poet wonders if we’ve entered a tunnel without end. If that’s the case, I’m glad we have poets like Rittberg to provide some illumination in the darkness.

- Tim Tomlinson, Author of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry) and This Is Not Happening to You (fiction)

The poems in He Is Walking Wider are filled with astute attention to the details of everyday life that resonate with and caress the heart. Written tenderly, the poems sing lustily, with shades of Whitman making appearances along with visitations from the likes of Fernando Botero and Peter Lorre. Whether enjoying the Waldeinsamkeit of the forest, contemplating the array of fellow riders on a NYC subway, sharing her adventures with online dating, or ending her marriage, Rittberg shares her observations with insight and humor. These are poems filled with celebration, wit, love, and pluck, and I highly recommend the collection.

-Karen Neuberg, Author of Persuasion and The Elephants are Walking

In Which Boychick Goes to Broadway (Short Story)

Legs. Bare legs glinting in the torpid summer sun, pervading my senses and the sweet, egg-laden yeasty smell of plaited bread, challah, rising and heaving in my mother’s oven — those were my first impressions of women. The women drifted past my basement window, legs extended, their small forms and scanty shifts plashing past, their perfume, ahhh, the perfume wafting in. At age six, already I knew there was more to life than my life and more to women than my mother.

I wanted to tell the interviewer this, in answer to her question, “when did you first discover women,” but I didn’t. She asked the question with a lilt in her voice and partly in the faint but vain hope that I might discover her. Her main purpose, however, was to unearth my secret relationship history, which many women would like to be a part of. I know this. I understand this — sort of.

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The Artists' Model (Short Story)

Piercing her sticky wad of clay, Margo felt a sense of revulsion at the naked male model straddling the large plywood platform, his legs splayed at what she considered to be an unnatural and almost lewd wide angle. His sloping forehead reminded her of an early man in a diorama she’d seen in the county natural history museum, a primitive subspecies that no longer existed. And weren’t models supposed to have defined musculature? This model’s torso was more Pillsbury dough boy than buff. She quickly chastened herself. She and her classmates were fortunate to have anyone who was willing to pose naked in their exurban enclave. Just one mention of the class in the community weekly paper would be enough to close the class down. When the session ended, Margo lingered at the front of the class, her fingers nervously closing and re-closing the hasp of her plastic art supply box while waiting for the model to get dressed. She chatted with him before she left the class, her small act of contrition.

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Allie’s Boy (Short Story)

"Kid, get in here," my boss Alexandra says, and I rush in. Allie is an impatient sort whose voice escalates from a whisper to sonic-boom timbre in record time. But the voice never has an edge to it. It is orotund yet dulcet, Zeus-as-female in a benevolent mode, albeit with bad acoustics. Although I am by metabolism and inclination slug-like, I rouse myself with the requisite fervor, having convinced myself since I began working for her four months ago that I have transformed myself into a high-energy type, and thus am eminently right, eminently suited for her, and thus a corporate asset.

I remind myself to duck as I enter her office, which contains an assortment of high-quality reproductions of unclad and semi-clad classical Greek sculptures, some of which are life-sized, armed, and dangerous.

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