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There are a great many things for which I have no talent. I know this – having tried and failed and tried again…
There are also a number of skills for which I possess insufficient strength.
And there are, of course, some things I simply choose not to do because I have neither the need or the desire for whatever it is that comes from doing those things.
I’ve learned to do laundry out of necessity and to cook out of interest. I learned to sew at my mother’s knee and to knit at my best friend’s house. In school, I learned calculus as a means to solving stress and strain equations for engineering. At work, I learned statistics to manage production variability and quality control.
My first response to home repair is “well, let’s take a look”. I learned that from my father. I didn’t always love getting roped into family projects at the time, but I am grateful now for the skills that resulted from my enforced labor. I take apart my own plumbing, replace electrical outlets, and, before disposal of the old stuff became a moral dilemma, I changed my own oil. I have redone a pair of bathrooms including replacing fixtures and tiling.
Not everyone can or should do it themselves, though. I get that. Not everyone grew up in a house with a mandatory apprenticeship program. I know gifted writers and brilliant lawyers who should neither waste their time nor put the rest of the planet at risk with their own home-repairs.
Yesterday afternoon, though, I caught a glimpse of a project underway in my neighborhood. I watched as the adults struggled with the bulk and weight of some of the materials while a gang of teenagers, presumably associated with the family, lingered nearby. Not helping. Not even watching.
This worries me.
(I know, I know – it is none of my business, and I am sure that my understanding of the situation is imperfect.)
It worries me anyway.
Beyond that, it makes me sad. I have great faith in any number of young people I have met in my life. I am, in general, hopeful.
That said, I am not convinced our school systems is doing everything in its power to provide our youth the skill set it will need. I will go so far as to say that it has crossed my mind that the reason we use “New Home Starts” as a critical measure of the economy is not so much to do with the American Dream of homeownership but more a need to provide employment for those products of our education system that emerge qualified only to swing a hammer.
What do the kids who are home on a random Wednesday in the middle of the day and who have never swung a hammer do?
(Yup – again…It’s none of my business…)
Having admitted my own failings as a human, as a one-at-a-time dog person, especially if that “one” is the beast, and made the decision to look for a forever home for Dash 2, I should have been prepared for the inevitable; that a home would be found.
I wasn’t ready.
Yesterday, I met with a pair of lovely women who have been on the hunt for a special boxer boy. Dash 2 met them and as soon as one of them took a seat he put his front paws on her lap and gave her a boxer hug. He happily took treats, gave kisses and cried at the fence when they left.
This morning we made introductions to the other dog in their household. Starting off with a walk, we moved to a fenced yard with leashes still on both dogs in case we needed to drag them apart, and finally saw them sniff and pull back, then sniff some more. Then they began play and bound around.
This afternoon Dash 2 went to their house to see how the family dynamic worked.
It worked fine.
Trust me, I looked for the fatal flaw. I inspected a thoroughly dog-friendly house. I eyed with envy the expanse of fenced yard, something I cannot provide. I watched the two women lovingly interact with “my boy”.
Dammit.
After talking with the rescue coordinator, who suggested that dragging a dog back and forth can be confusing, I said my goodbyes, drove home and wept.
I am still thinking that the decision that to let Dash 2 go was a good one. I am still thinking the folks recommended by the woman who rescued Dash 2 are wonderful.
I am still crying.
Though only 64 degrees today it is sunny and feels much warmer. With nearly 4 days without a downpour the back yard is no longer a mud pit, and as of yesterday was actually mowable…and mow I did; no mean feat when you consider the dog management that has to go into that.
The front yard must be mowed with both dogs outside in the back because Dash 2 won’t go inside without me, and is not so happy outside without at least the beast. The back yard must be mowed with the beast inside, as she is intensely curious about the mower and will attack it from every angle, and with Dash 2 outside for the same reason as before.
Beast management and the records rains of April have left little time for some of the other outside work I would like to have had completed by now. The vegetable garden has not been turned over and is nowhere near ready for planting. The zinnias that I have started inside, three times, have, yet again, sprouted to life, greened up and, without warning, wilted and fallen over. The patch of bramble in the side yard where two years ago I had a small thatch of mint has sprawled. The grass is overrun with minty spikes. With no time to fully contain them yesterday, I just mowed them down.
Delicious.
Quite possibly the best reward for pushing a lawn mower around a muddy, rutted, slightly weed-ridden postage stamp of a yard. It was also quite possibly the inspiration for the first of the season batch of ice tea; tea the way my mother used to make it.
It has become fashionable to brew summer teas gently. A jar perched precariously on the porch railing is slowly and mysically transformed into nectar by the summer sun. More and more folks are using herbal teas or exotic flavors; delicately sweetened with locally made honey. These are wonderful trends to which I politely say “pah!”
My mother’s secret was mint from the garden, combined with good old Lipton tea, lemon juice, granulated white sugar and water…boiled. It is the scent and the taste of summer to me, and right now there is a big old pot of it sitting on my stove.
I will tell you that I am not really bothered by this first Mother’s Day since my mother’s death. I remain unaffected. It is, after-all, a Hallmark holiday, made up for the sole purpose of selling greeting cards. In the American way, over the years it has morphed into a gimmick to sell flowers and jewelry, as well.
(Seriously? Jewelry?)
Whatever it started out as and whatever it has morphed into makes no difference to me, especially since this year I am without obligation. I don’t even have to pretend that I don’t think this is the stupidest annual event ever.
What I do find myself pretending is that the 6 month anniversary of my mother’s death passed without notice earlier this week. I am pretending that my watery eyes are solely the product of seasonal allergies. I am telling myself that I like the silence in the house, and it is not sappy mommy stories and the continued sales pitches that drove me to nearly smashing the radio.
While I am putting on a brave front, I am telling myself I am not the most selfish person in the whole world and that I should not feel badly at all for deciding that I was not cut out to be part of a two dog household…at least not as long the beast is one of them.
What I cannot fool myself about is that, in my decision, I may very well be losing the best dog ever…
Ack.
A couple of my recent posts have been about keeping your eyes open. In Driving Lessons, one of my major points was the lifesaving property of watching the actual movement of vehicles around you rather than the rather uncertain implied intentions of a turn signal. In Look, I wrote of the welcome reminder to simply look around you at the good that is a happening right under our noses.
And then I forgot to look.
I have had my head down for days; plowing through a large share of work that is due, getting my taxes done and sorting and filing the mass of paperwork that remains in the aftermath of IRS and State calculations, reviewing documents, updating forms and returning calls. It has occurred to me on several late night occasions that I had not written a post, but in all the churn of administrative details I found no inspiration for writing; forgetting, of course, or at least temporarily ignoring, that part of my pledge is to write something everyday.
Once again I have missed an anniversary. I started writing two years ago yesterday with two posts; as an explanation of my chosen blog header I wrote Metastable, and in an admission, in The Morning After, confessed that the act of starting a blog may not have been entirely well-thought out.
At that point I had been home, retired, for about four years. My mother had been in a nursing home for more than a year as her dementia had advanced, yet her general health was remarkably, dishearteningly good.
At that point in my life, the beast was still a mush-faced bundle of random energy who peed on my floor, chewed on my hands and pulled like a sled dog on a leash. My circle of local “friends” consisted nearly entirely of caregivers and residents of long-term care facilities. I was working a job that ultimately would leave me feeling expendable. I had things to say but no forum for saying them. My experience as caregiver felt isolating.
My how things change…
So I missed the anniversary yesterday, but today I stopped to look back and see how far I have come. Thanks to all of you who have joined me on this journey.
It is that time of year.
Pro’s are scheduling lessons and re-stocking the shop. Greens keepers are inspecting for winter damage and getting courses across the country in shape. Avid players are trying to get themselves back in shape, too.
But that is all beside the point. I can’t drive a golf ball squarely to save my life.
I really want to talk about learning to drive a car. While experience counts, some experiences are pretty costly. Few experiences are more costly than driving lessons learned the hard way, yet a number of drivers seem to get much of their education that way. One need only listen to morning drive reports to get a small sense of how much experience can help.
Throughout the winter, I took care to listen to snowy-morning traffic reports. On mornings with a few inches of fresh snow, accidents littered the roads and tangled traffic in all directions. On mornings with more than just a few inches of snow, accidents were less likely.
One of the discriminants?? Schools were closed.
It’s true that I don’t have a complete statistical analysis of this. I am also cautioned by my education in data analysis that a cause and effect relationship cannot be assumed from such an uncontrolled experiment. But strict analysis aside, it does seem likely that the lack of experience behind the wheel among the youngest of drivers, those still in school, probably contributes to the chaos on the highway.
Experience is a wonderful, if occasionally very harsh, teacher. In the case of driving, learning from someone else’s experience would certainly be an easier and cheaper lesson plan.
So who did you learn from? What did they teach you?
Although I took driver’s ed in high school in order to reduce my insurance premiums, my parents were my primary teachers. The lessons started even before I got my permit. Deciding that, if I thought I could operate a car all by myself, I would have to navigate the permit process all by myself, too. My parents let me take the take the bus downtown to the DMV. I spent much of my 15th birthday in line alone and the rest of the afternoon on the bus.
Lesson 1: You have to figure out how to get someplace before you start out on the journey.
It snowed on the very day that I got my learner’s permit. That night my father took me out to the large, unplowed parking lot of a nearby church to do some training. He showed me how to get the car into a skid and how to get out of it. Yes, we went out doing doughnuts. It was fun. It was also a valuable lesson.
Lesson 2: If you know how to get a car into a skid, you should also have a pretty good idea how not to do it, too. And if you’ve gotten a car out of a skid before, you can do it again.
My father worked downtown while I was in high school. Occasionally, I would be downtown in the afternoons and would ride home with him. Until I was learning to drive myself, I never fully appreciated some of the challenges of highway driving and changing lanes. My father’s rule of thumb was that if you can’t see the front bumper of the car behind you in your rear view mirror, you are too close to pull in front of him.
He also was clear that you should always be accelerating when you change lanes. The danger is behind you. You should be pulling away from the danger. The corollary; if you don’t have room to be accelerating, even mildly, you don’t have room to change lanes.
My father’s own words echo in my head periodically; “the guy behind you wants to get home, too”.
Lesson 3: It’s not someone else’s fault that you are in the wrong lane when your exit comes up. If you can’t change lanes safely, you go to the next exit.
Yesterday, I was driving out to an appointment. I had to make a left turn at the last light on my journey there. Because the intersection is not so heavily traveled, it does not have a turn arrow or even a turn lane, so I waited while the first three opposing cars came through the intersection. The fourth vehicle had its left turn signal on.
Phew, I thought; I can turn when he does, and I will make this light.
Except he didn’t turn. The multi-ton construction vehicle barreled through the intersection; right across my intended path. Instead of slowing to make the turn, the slight hesitation I saw was just the driver shifting gears to keep on accelerating. My little Mini would barely have felt like a bump in the road to him.
I’ve never been so grateful to have my father’s voice in my head.
Lesson 4: Watch the wheels not the turn signal.
There are, most certainly, some diagnoses where the cure is far tougher than the disease. In most cases, it is the patient who is most deeply effected by both disease and cure, yet with dementia it seems that it is the families that can be effected most severely.
Managing a loved one with dementia, has more challenges than I can count. These efforts are frequently made even more challenging by our inability to manage our own response to behaviors exhibited by someone who should “know better”; someone we love or have come to depend on.
How do you stop from being that person who shouts at a loved one? How do you cope with the daily discouragement over what has been unlearned overnight? How do you overcome the embarrassment that new behaviors can cause?
For me the answer was simple reminder.
It’s the disease…
… a simple, but sometimes hard to channel, reminder.
My mother did not decide one day not to walk any longer. She was not trying to drive me insane with forgotten words and misplaced items. Not once did my mother deliberately turn the tv volume up to its maximum level and leave it there. It wasn’t her fault that she could not order off of a menu, or follow a conversation, or distinguish between her phone and her remote control.
It was the disease that did all that, and no amount of shouting, or careful lecturing, or huffing in exasperation, or blushing in mortification was going to change that.
She also didn’t decide to get sick. Let’s be honest. At least some of the shouting comes from a place of fear of what is to come or astonished disappointment that the one person who has been there for us our whole life may not be here forever.
We are a death denying society. That feeling of immortality probably helps us in some ways to achieve what we might otherwise fear. I am sure that our wholesale aversion to the natural end of life is part of the engine that drives huge leaps forward in medicine. In those instances, our defiance is good, but when faced with the inevitable; that our parents are dying; we are ill-prepared…so we shout at the people we love. We beg them to remember. We rage at the slowness of their gate and fume at the repeated questions.
Do remember, though, we aren’t being blithely abandoned.
It’s the disease.
A long time ago, I wrote about how difficult family dynamics can make dealing with stressful situations, like aging parents, even more difficult. Even in the best of families, there are times that are just plain difficult. And even in the good times family can simply be hard.
We have huge expectations and a lifetime worth of baggage that come along for the ride in the family car. Sometimes there are unforgivable wrongs behind the hard feelings. Many times there are resentments that linger from something so utterly uncontrollable as the order in which each sibling was born or as incomprehensible as perceived favoritism or simply from the pressure to be a good kid.
I was once again reminded of this by a particularly telling statement made amidst the daily razzing one of the morning show DJ’s was taking.
The subject of the day’s razzing stemmed from the co-hosts’ incredulous reactions to the news of the host’s actions the previous week when his elderly neighbors found themselves in crisis. The morning show host had grudgingly recounted his efforts of the previous week; hesitant I am sure both for the disbelief he would face and for blowing his cover as the guy least likely to come through. But his wife had let the cat out of the bag and the co-hosts weren’t going to let it go.
What struck me in the middle of this conversation was the host’s declaration that he could not have done for his own parents what he did for his neighbors. In that statement, he held no malice for his own folks. He just meant that the combined obstacles of added work in the face of bearing witness to his parent’s decline would have been more than he was willing, or maybe able, to contemplate. To illustrate his point he recounted that the interaction of his neighbor’s daughter with her parents, her mother in particular quickly devolved to shouting.
“Mom why can’t you…? You know that doesn’t go there. You know dad can’t come home now!!”
Been there.
Shouted that.
Caring for an elderly parent, particularly one with dementia, isn’t just a series of tasks. It’s not just another household to clean and five times more doctors appointments to keep track of. It’s not just about the fact that every couch crevice and coat pocket is host to a wad of damp kleenex and every scrap of paper has a note scrawled with some vital piece of unintelligible information. It’s not just the endless stream of questions…or really the endless stream of question (singular); the same one repeated until you become convinced that not only is there a genetic component to many forms of dementia but that there is a fair chance that it is also contagious and that you seem to be showing all the symptoms, too.
Caring for an elderly parent comes with fear of getting it wrong, anxiety over getting their disease, real or perceived pressure from siblings and the very real sense of impending loss. That, my friends, is a lot of baggage to get loaded up for a single trip to the doctor, and it is a lot of stuff to get in the way while you are trying to vacuuming. It’s a lot to carry in from the car every time you go to visit.
On a long journey like the trip through aging parenthood, we need to learn to travel lighter.
What would you do if you had a million dollars? Two million? A hundred million?
In yesterday’s post I confessed to being an occasional Lottery player. I confessed to knowing the odds and playing anyway. I confessed to, for all practical purposes, throwing my money away in the pursuit of a couple of intangibles; the euphoria of holding a ticket that would make me a millionaire and the insight that playing out those “what if” scenarios brings into who I might be if I had that kind of cash.
What if I won? And who would I be?
I suspect that first-time what-if players lean toward the fast car, fast lane (quickly broke?) lifestyle. If I could remember back to the first time I held a lottery ticket, maybe I would find that I leaned that way, too.
Lately, my what-ifs, lottery or no, are much more grounded.
Several years ago, I was interviewing for a full-time job. The job was in management, in the field in which I had worked, with a fair amount of success, for twenty years. It was likely that I would get an offer and it was likely to pay well. It would certainly pay well enough to live; making my retirement income somewhat disposable.
Ultimately, I decided that I didn’t want to leave my family. I decided that my “work” here at home was more important. After 20 years of roaming the globe, I decided that, for now, I would stay put. I put conditions on my employment and ultimately the company did not make an offer; to me or anyone else, as it turns out.
Even knowing that I had done this to myself, I was still disappointed. Some of that is ego. It would simply have been nice to have been wanted.
More disappointing, I found was that the one balm I had offered my conscience, while contemplating selling myself into a soul-sucking daily grind, was the opportunity to use my retirement income to write a check every month to the charity of my choice. My mind played over the options; a healthy chunk to Alzheimer’s research, to international relief work, to local support agencies. Some of my planned “good works” were a little more frivolous. April’s check might have gone to sponsoring a Little League team. September’s to sponsor a class trip.
That’s what I thought I would do if my current income became disposable income.
In more recent years, as my lack of employment has caused me to nibble away at savings, all while watching the cash flow in the care of my mother, I have become even more frantic about saving a proper nest egg. As, genetically, it appears likely that my demise will be long and humbling, I am ever more conscious that a long goodbye is also quite costly. For someone who wishes to have choices about end-of-life care, the price tag comes in at somewhere around $600,000.
So forget living the high-life. I need to win the lottery to die well.
I think that makes me officially old.
My house is busy with extra activity this evening; so much so that, while I really would like to grab a shower, I’m not sure that I will be able to fit it in. A friend’s beast is spending the night. Even though it is just for the night, it still represents to me a growing family; a deeper connection to the beings around me… even in the chaos that has ensued.
Shortly after my return to my hometown I was asked how long I would be here. My answer was that I would be here as long as it takes to see my mother through her illness. It never occurred to me that I would consider staying after that. The isolation of the early months of my return and the realization of what I would witness while I was here made growing attached to this place incomprehensible to me.
I assumed that my natural restlessness; fed but not created by my nomadic Navy life, and the difficulties I would face here would have me running for the opposite coast as soon as I could.
A natural introvert, it is not in my nature to go out and collect a large circle of friends. In the past my social life has been an outcropping of my work life. With no work life here initially and one later that did not foster much of a bond between co-workers, finding even a small circle of friends eluded me here; shockingly in a place where I grew up. I joked in a previously post that the median age of my new friends was about 80. The folks with whom I most commonly shared any kind of social activities were my mother’s fellow residents.
It seemed for a long time that there would be nothing to keep me here.
Discounting family, of course.
But you can’t discount family… anymore than you can define that family strictly by shared genetic coding.
While it is quite true that my family will love me regardless of my zip code, there is something quite grand about being around for some of the little moments; to be included not just in opening Christmas presents with my nephew, but to be around for an evening of homework; to have a chance to see the way he frowns in concentration while playing a computer game; to have a chance, periodically, to put him on the school bus or to kiss him goodnight.
It is also true that the beast will love me as long as I have treats or a free hand to rub her belly with. She could always travel with me, should I uproot myself, but she has lived here all her life. More importantly, her support system is here; her vet, her kennel, her day care, the neighbors I trust with a key to my house just in case I am stuck somewhere and need to have someone let her out.
And she has a job here… While we are still looking for the perfect niche for her as a therapy dog, she has scheduled visits out through the Fall.
I have a job, too. Now my actual work I could probably do from anywhere, but I have other things to keep me from roaming to far. If the beast has therapy dog obligations, then so do I. I am committed to the fledgling charitable organization that a small group of fabulous people have started.
In the past few weeks I have put kids on buses, picked up kids from afterschool programs, baked for a neighbor, helped in a class, waited at the hospital, visited a handful of nursing homes, mailed packages for someone, grabbed mail and entertained someone else’s four-legged friend.
It would be easy to label those things as obligations, or favors to be repaid, but they aren’t. They are all a part of being here.
They are all a part of my growing family.
I am still restless, but unlike my early predictions. I am not eager to leave this place behind.
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