I talked with several young friends yesterday. When I say young, I mean in their late 30s or early 40s, which I used to think was old as time and beyond all understanding, but you know, things change.

All three of them were pretty much infuriated with someone. Two of them chose to be infuriated with their mother-in-law.

One of them was visiting their partner’s family in another state. Their partner’s mother, a woman in her 70s, drives them wild with fury. Earlier, I suggested to my friend they shouldn’t stay in the family house if they didn’t want to when they’re out of state, so they took my advice. Now they are feeling guilty about enforcing their boundaries. I told them to suck up the guilt and deal with it.

Another friend is living in a house with their partner, their partner’s mother, and their partner’s sister. The mother-in-law is in her mid-80’s, and is annoying. I asked what the woman did that was annoying, and apparently she sneaks people food to my friend’s dog and listens to talk radio without earphones. This moved my friend to outrage. I tried to listen, tried to share my own experience with dealing with stubborn, elderly, difficult family members.

But though my own mother filled me with rage when I was her caregiver, it is getting harder and harder to be sympathetic. That’s because I’m 74.

What is it about the elderly that is so massively, disproportionately infuriating? Oh, I know it’s partly a rhetorical question, don’t mind me. We are impatient, foolish, stubborn, demanding, mischievous, opinionated, confused, and often wrong. We are frail, we smell bad (no joke, there’s an old-person smell that has nothing to do with hygiene), and we can’t do things for ourselves that any normal person can do. We forget to wear our hearing aids and talk loudly. We require help. We take up space. We are not dead. We should be dead. We should be out of sight, at the very least.

I talked to my friend and agreed that the mother-in-law was annoying. I said I was never so full of seething resentment as when I was dealing with my weirdly demented and handicapped mother, whose Parkinson’s disease turned her into a distorted version of someone who was already pretty annoying.

I also pointed out that my friend’s mother-in-law is basically a prisoner in her daughter’s house.

My friend said they might have to move her into a nursing home, and I pointed out that nursing homes are worse prisons, and that my father caught COVID and died of pneumonia right after he finally had to enter one.

I guess I was not terribly consoling, you’re right.

But there are two things these days that bother me about the way we talk about old people. One of them is that it’s acceptable to be ageist in a way it’s not acceptable to be racist and sexist. It’s been normalized to blame old people for everything. Everything. Even if we were working actively for progressive causes, and never had any money or a second home, it’s all our fault. We give everyone someone to blame that is not capitalism, in other words.

The other thing is that old people are a reminder people don’t want, a reminder of what is going to happen to them eventually. Denial is the engine of survival for a lot of people, and we don’t want to believe we will ever be old. Even though our cats turn into ragged dust mops with crazed, half-blind eyes who wail in vacant rooms when they lose track of us. Even though old people are everywhere, with our walkers and our shopping carts, climbing slowly into the bus and holding on to the bars with a fear that seems unwarranted.

People see the elderly as something other, not entitled to want freedom, independence, love, and talk radio. Deliberately stubborn. Yeah, we’re being deliberately stubborn. Everyone is.

I didn’t stop being a human being just because I turned 70, I guess I’m saying. Or (despite what everyone said when I was young) when I turned 30, or 40, or 50.

There’s no expiration date on thinking you’re still a human being. And human beings, at whatever age, are really, really annoying.

Just ask the other young friend who called me. She was plenty mad, too, but she was mad at her sister and at a friend who won’t listen to her, but neither of those people was old, so I didn’t find that conversation nearly as difficult.