First, Medicare may be able to pay the LW for being the caregiver to her elderly parents. When my grandmother needed live-in care, we were told that Medicare would pay the salary of the caregiver, even if it was a relative. Check it out. If caring for your parents becomes your job, you may not need another one.

Second, don't assume the LW's sister is rich just because she lives abroad. She might be in the Peace Corps, or ESL teaching in a village in China, or hiding from the feds in Mexico. Don't assume she can be hit up for money. She may not have any. And if her job is in another country, ordering her to get on a plane and come home is just stupid. I assume the LW knows what can realistically be expected of the sister and knows it isn't much.

We also have to assume that there is some reason the LW isn't looking into having her elderly parents put into a nursing home. If she simply has some ingrained belief that everybody's parents deserve to die at home, maybe she needs to re-examine that belief. I wouldn't want to live at the home in old age at the expense of my daughter's well-being. If I had a big joint family South Asian style with several stay-at-home daughters in law I would love it (don't know how the DILs would feel about it--maybe I could babysit). But Americans no longer live that way. Sucks, but that's where it is.

She does need to get her life back somehow. It sounds like she suffers from a general lack of purpose as well. I was a world lit major, so joining a book club does wonders for me. It's hard to think of something else to do when you have so much on your plate already, though. It's hard to think your life has ended up in this place where you live in poverty while caring for three old folks who piss on themselves. That's surely not what you dreamed of when you were twenty or thirty. What did the LW dream of when she was twenty or thirty? Maybe she needs in some small way to get back to that.

Naturally it's a pretty safe bet that the play was written by one of the minority group of non-Muslims.

Because if the play had been written by a Muslim woman, she'd be dead by now.

it could have been even more emphasized. Trying to replace lost family life with a "group marriage", and how it does not work.

I thought the author did a good job of trying to balance what his parents were looking for with the damage they did to their child(ren) in the process.

There are better ways to build family and community than by having sex with all the neighbors you happen to find attractive. Better and more grown-up ways. Of course paying more attention to old Aunt Julia and helping her weed the garden is less fun than fucking your best friend's hot wife, at least if you're an immature little dickhead.

"Polyamory" is just another way for players (who are sociopaths) to get more people to play, and to hell with the lives they destroy.

The author's mother is a good example of this.

Most of us, fortunately, recognize that people we may not want to have sex with are still worth some investment of time and commitment. We realize that everybody counts, the old people, the kids, the parents, and not just people whose asses we want to get into. That's how you get a family and a community.

Not through "polyamory".

Hint to the unbelieving: there's a reason you don't hear about these "experiments" any more, and a reason why they're dated to the 70s. They didn't work. That's why.

This is funny because German women, like the Dutch, are usually quite obsessed with cleanliness--yes, even today, this is considered a great virtue--so the book has some context for German ladies that Americans are missing. It's more rebellious than simply repulsive in their view.

This American lady only has this to say--"Girl, you nasty!"

But you know, spiritual comforts? WTF? The excerpts read like the subject/narrator has a mental illness. Saving semen under your fingernails "to enjoy later"? Excuse me, any attempt to seek the positive in that is berserk.

This stuff is dated, and kind of boring. We all stink if we don't clean ourselves. Men too, and you don't see them getting a complex about it. They just take a shower. Speaking of which, that's what I need to do after reading this dreck.

Stinking isn't a source of spiritual comfort. It just makes it hard to imagine why any man would want to get close enough to her to have sex with her....ewwwwww.