Page 382 of 524

Tiny Rant about Elderly Parents


Just a tiny one or my husband will be commenting about how I need to blog less and work on my “serious” writing more (’cause daddy is waiting to be a kept man), but can we talk about our parents? My father is nearly 81 years old, has cataracts, and a left foot that is basically inoperable due to a serious of strokes and complications from circulatory issues and he is still driving. Yes, still driving. When last I was home my mother wanted me to talk with him about handing over the keys. I told her that all she needed to do was hide them and have my brother-in-law disable Dad’s car if she didn’t want to put her foot down with him. She didn’t do that and he has been in a fender bender of late. No major damage and no one was injured, but I think that is beside the point. I was a bit heartless when I told Mom today that it’s her responsibility as Dad’s caregiver to make the tough calls sometimes and this is one of them. I then took the highest of high ground when I pointed out that I had taken my late husband’s keys away from him before he was even diagnosed with his illness despite his protests and the mutterings and pouting that went along with his disintegrating mind. My last husband was still ambulatory and much stronger than I was whereas my Dad can barely walk from the kitchen table to the sink and spends most of his day in bed or sitting in a recliner in the living room.

But what makes me even more angry is that Dad is in his right mind. He knows perfectly well that he isn’t fit to drive because of his difficulty of movement and blind spots. He knows! And he is just being pig-headed. And yes, I do know that this is an independence issue and hard on his pride and sense of himself as a man. The last part being key because the medication he has had to take over the last nearly three years have changed him physically and causes him embarrassment. Though he tries to have a sense of humor about it like the time my sister was helping me button a dress shirt and it fit a bit snugly, he remarked, “Look at these great breasts and your mother doesn’t appreciate them at all.” The make ego and sense of self is as strong at 80 as it is at 3. A man is a man and he feels less of one, but does that mean we wait until he backs over one of the neighbor kids or his own grandchild before we do what is necessary? (Evil me threw that at my mom too. I take the whole care-taking gig seriously. Though I will grant you that part of me is a bit pissed that I had no choice about the uni-lateral decisions I had to make once upon a time that my mother and my younger sister seem to think are optional.)

Tonight I get to have this lovely conversation all over again with my sister, who is still torqued at me for abdicating my number one son position to run off with Mr. Simpson and live in exile. She is tired and over-burdened and I get that, but she is still in charge. What did she think? That being the oldest was just a perk-filled pleasure romp?

Sometimes being the adult child sucks, but that’s the “adult” part of it. 

Finished Updating my Archives


I have now officially moved all my posts from both Blogger and .Mac to this site. It has been somewhat interesting to look back at where I was a year or more ago, but not something I would want to do too often. In the past I have always destroyed journals of my daily life at some point. The ones I kept through high school and college were toast by the time I was on my own and teaching in Des Moines. The stuff from my early twenties to my early thirties (about 15 spiral notebooks) were purged when I bought my first house and moved from the apartments. I just don’t think that kind of thing is good to keep around. Of course as my husband points out there is no such thing as “delete” once you publish something on the web which is why I am grateful I didn’t have anything like this blog back in the days of my youthful stupidity. Men seem to be totally okay with having been “young, dumb and full of cum”, but I don’t know too many middle-aged women who are as serene about their teens and twenties. Perhaps those are the rough years for women and men don’t experience a similar thing until the hit middle-age? Just a thought.

Anyway the archives are as complete as I can make them and as categorized as I care to make them. I was a teacher, not a librarian.

Grief Groups and the Four Seasons


We had hospice last week. Katy loves to go and see the other kids and do the activities. She has improved a lot since she started going to the children’s grief group. For Rob and I though the parents’ version hasn’t had the same effect. Rob finds that it simply digs up things that he has put to rest (no pun intended and naturally he knows that you can never truly put grief behind you yet it does become something that isn’t constantly in your face all the time too), and I find that I am a bit annoyed with the way the group functions. There is a trained grief counselor there but lately she has been working with training sessions for volunteers and so we are left with a hospice volunteer to lead the group. She is an older woman who reads prompts to us from handouts and speaks in platitudes. 

So this last week, she had a video for us to watch. As a former teacher the moment I am told I have to watch a video, I immediately suspect the worst and I am seldom disappointed. This particular one was circa 1989 and was little better than a slide show. It was a narrator talking us through the four seasons with lovely flora photos and inspirational sayings from famous people who have lost loved ones. The four seasons thing was enough to set my teeth on grind because I heard more than I cared to about the importance of living through widowhood for four seasons before one could do anything from sell the house to go out for coffee with someone of the opposite sex, and frankly, I find the idea to be some of the worst nonsense ever, but I am digressing. The video was supposed to set up talking points and to that end our facilitator planned to pause the tape after each season.

The first season was fall. After viewing it, we were asked to comment. I had already decided to not comment. I know, from years and years of faculty meetings and inservices, that the fastest way to kill a crappy exercise is to sit and say nothing. A good teacher (or facilitator) can deal with this but there aren’t that many people who are good at either of the aforementioned and usually they cave fairly quickly. My dearest husband though works for a large multi-national corporation and his training says “When something is bullshit – speak up.” And so he did. He said he felt that the video would have been useful to him in the first month or so but that now it merely dredged up things that didn’t need to be reviewed. We watched the rest of the video without stopping and then we moved on to other topics. 

I love my husband.