Why is Grandma Naked?: Caring for Your Aging Parent

Ellen Pober Rittberg

Mar 2021 · Ellen Pober Rittberg

About this ebook

If you’ve wondered how to get your parent to the bathroom on time a/k/a “getting their rump on the (toilet seat) hump” or puzzled over their bogus explanations why the dings and dents on their car make it resemble a Picasso sculpture or what to do that first time your parents whip off their clothes in front of a large open picture window (“close the curtains”) or cringed over their sudden toddler-like table manners, cringe no more. Instead, laugh out loud and learn what works and doesn’t work to avoid feeling as if you and you loved one suddenly or subtly entered The Twilight Zone. Ellen will cheer you on. Dementia, physical decline and illness don’t have to defeat or even depress you. Yes, stress comes with the territory sometimes but Ellen holds your hand through what is ultimately a satisfying and life-transforming journey and lesson.

Ratings and reviews

Humorous and Insightful Book on Taking Care of Elderly Parents — As you might guess from the title, subtitle, and cover of this book, the author talks about caring for your aging parent in both a straightforward fashion and with humor. This is just the sort of nonfiction I like, as it is deeply grounded in the author's personal experience of taking care of her elderly mother. Having recently gone through this in tandem with my sister for our elderly mother, I wish we had the book several years ago. The author's examples and insights are spot-on. Not all the humor hit home with me, as some of it was perhaps a little unkind to the caregiver. Taking care of your aging parent is difficult, whether you are able to live with your parent—like the author—or whether you adjust your life to take care of their needs as best you can. The book is organized by the ABCs, with repeats on most letters, discussing topics like bodily functions, falls, and delusions/paranoia. Each chapter is split into sections: an introductory paragraph describing the topic in general, things to know, and example(s). If you have an aging parent, I highly recommend this book despite some of its shortcomings. — I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.

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About the author

Ellen Pober Rittberg is an award-winning journalist, attorney and author of humorous self-help books whose first-person essays and features have appeared in the New York Times, HuffPost, Reader's Digest , Newsday and other large media platforms. A caregiver and parenting expert, she lectures and facilitates entertaining and informative discussions based on what worked for her (and didn't!) as a family caregiver to her mother, and she also lectures about parenting. As an attorney, she represented hundreds of senior citizens and children and also in other, separate cases, wrote reports and recommendations for judges in guardianship proceedings and had occasion to speak with many eldercare and parenting mental health professionals. Her first humorous self-help book, 35 Things Your Teen Won't Tell You, So I Will is her game plan for surviving three close-in-age teenagers (three in three years) with her sanity and sense of humor largely intact. For several years she hosted and produced a live, cable television show, The Changing Family for which she won a press award for Best Public Affairs Show. Before Covid, she lectured on cruise ships, libraries and bookstores about parenting, caregiving and creative writing, and continues to lecture on zoom. Her poetry book, He is Walking Wider, was published in July, 2021 by Kelsay Books.