Family Time — How YOPD Corrupts It

my son being scolded for skipping his meals

My 11-year-old son skipped his lunch because he was going for a night stay at a friend’s house that evening, where there would be pizzas, burgers, and junk food.

My wife was already under immense stress. The same employer that had fired me because of my worsening Young Onset Parkinson’s a few months earlier, had now also let her go. Financial anxiety had settled permanently into our home like dampness in a wall.

When my mother-in-law complained that our son had refused to eat his lunch, my wife exploded in frustration. She scolded him harshly, telling him about the importance of eating healthy food and not skipping his meals, while he sat there silently, staring at his plate.

Watching the tension rise triggered something in me.

I began to laugh.

Not because I found it funny. Not because I was mocking my son. But because Parkinson’s has slowly damaged the circuits that regulate emotional expression. For years I’ve lived with emotional incontinence — a pseudo-bulbar effect that can make laughter erupt at the worst possible moments.

My family knows this.

Or at least, they’ve been told.

My laughter only made things worse.

“This is no laughing matter,” my wife snapped. “If you want to laugh, go to your room and laugh quietly in a corner.”

The room fell silent except for the sound of my son hurriedly gulping down his lunch.

He looked hurt.

I moved closer and tried to put my arm around him gently, wanting somehow to tell him that I was on his side, that I understood, that I wasn’t laughing at him.

He pushed my hand away.

“You laughed when I was being scolded,” he said.

The words sliced through me with terrifying precision.

In that moment, I realized something cruel about Parkinson’s: it does not only corrupt movement, speech, or facial expression. It slowly corrupts interpretation itself. The disease twists the signals you send to the people you love until comfort looks like mockery, concern looks like indifference, and involuntary laughter looks like cruelty.

My family is exhausted by Parkinson’s.

And perhaps now, exhausted by my presence too.

Sometimes I feel as though Parkinson’s is slowly erasing my place within my own family.