Papa Don't Preach and the Other End of Age

My recent singing of Prince's "Raspberry Beret" with different words (which I wrote about in this post) led me to some additional thoughts:

--I needed to snap myself out of a morning funk, so I sang Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach"--softly because I was at my parents' house.  No, this is not one of my usual go-to songs to snap myself to a better mindset.  But I heard it on my long drive to Williamsburg on Tuesday night and it's stuck in my head.

--The line about keeping my baby led me to do some math.  If the speaker in that song had kept her baby in 1986, that baby would be 39 years old, and let's assume the mom would be 16 or 17 years older, so 55 or 56.  I thought of the papa in the story, who likely now needs some assistance in his twilight years.  I thought of a short story, but that's been done to death. 

--I'd love to create a poem, but again, not around the issue of elder care or teenage pregnancy.  I want to write about caring for aging parents when we're all just flabbergasted that we've become this old.  In their minds, they're my age.  In my mind, I'm 32.  In some ways, we're reverting back to my adolescent years, with lots of focus on who should be eating what.  There's body shaming, both the kind we did during my adolescence, and the shame that comes with aging bodies that know exactly how old they are and lose no opportunity to remind us.