From time to time, still a grandmother to the core, she looked over with pride. When I turned around, I found my mother next to him, snapping together blocks with the same careful concentration. When my son was 4, on a family vacation, I left out a handful of Legos on the kitchen island for him to play with. There was a time in our lives when their interests, cognitive abilities and command of language all seemed to match exactly. She was well into losing language, speaking what sounded like Finnish in her confident doctor’s voice.

By the time he was 2½, he chatted so deftly that people on the subway commented on his language skills. Nine months later, while he was starting tummy time, she began to dress oddly and become unaccountably furious. My mother’s FTD seems to date almost from my son’s birth, where she was present, silently monitoring the gynecologist like the working physician she was. The difference between those we care for is that while my son throws around words like “parameters,” my mother will now put a Lego in her mouth to test if it’s food. We can name to the hour when they have last gone. We have to be vigilant to get our charges to the bathroom in time. These conditions mean that my father and I are in a similar situation. And this pooping gives him the freedom, he seems to feel, to occasionally pee if he’s doing something really important. Unofficially, encopresis means my 6-year-old still sometimes poops in his pants. Officially, encopresis is a physical and psychological state in which a child who is often constipated begins to associate pooping with pain. My son has a far less serious, though somewhat mortifying, condition. People with FTD live an average of five to eight years after diagnosis, and my mother is nearing the end. in English from Columbia University and worked as an English professor until she was 40, when she became a physician - to someone whose last vestige of recognizable cognition is to lean down to kiss the doll she carries around. FTD has reduced a stunning intellect - my mother got a Ph.D. That’s not the kind where an elderly individual can’t remember what you just said but may recite for you a poem she learned in grade school. My 75-year-old mother has frontotemporal dementia.

As I sat there, sandwiched between the two of them, I realized they were the only people in the world who could do this and not bother me at all. Last month, a few days before we finally put my mother into a home, I sat on the couch between her and my 6-year-old son, one asleep on each shoulder. This story was originally published on Jan.

Pretty Bitches by Lizzie Skurnick