Saturday, June 20, 2015

The Lighter Side. . . Naked Exercise

Envision this. . . Night Fever by the Bee Gees is blasting in the background.  I hear thuds emerging from my room upstairs.  One can only wonder what is transpiring in my house, given that the girls and I are the only ones home.  I run up the oak stairs and there, in my room, on the floor wrapped in pink and blue towels is my three year old, seated in pike position, arms outstretched with her arms, hands clutching our pink 2 pound weights.  On her face is the biggest smile I have ever seen.  I cannot help but laugh.  Not to be outdone by her sister, LB runs into her room.  Moments later, I think Jane Fonda is in my hallway doing hip thrusts.  In seeing the same big smile on her face, I realize again, how lucky I am.

The Fight Starts Now. . .

"Resolve swept through me. I was experiencing a mental breakthrough! From now on, I must concentrate on what I have, not what I have lost" (Friel, 1993, p 98).

In her 1993 memoir, Living in the Labyrinth: A personal journey through the maze of Alzheimer's, Friel  painfully describes how she has been woefully aware of her emerging deficiencies that include loss of spatial relations, word finding difficulties, personal memory gaps and the like.  These losses render her unable to work professionally, but also create a chasm with her family.  She works hard to keep these losses her little secret and her family often cannot understand why she cannot proceed with things as she has done in the past. 

Tragic flaws are inherent in being human.  We lose something over the course of our lives: our looks, athletic abilities, our loved ones, our ability to drive, something.  Can we look beyond what we have lost and lovingly embrace what we still have left?  Can we change our lives despite knowing the label of these pending losses? It is a challenge that I am posing to myself.  But this challenge is also a fight.  A fight to overcome the status quo, to do more, to be more open, and to love.   A fight that needs to fought before it is too late.

And so, today, at this very moment, the fight for living, a fight for relishing what I have begins. . .

Friday, June 19, 2015

Weaning

Weaning.  A word that has been tossed around our house like a garden salad for over two years.  As a mom who has embraced extended breastfeeding, one might think that my musing over the term "weaning" may revolve around the fact that my husband and I are in negotiations on when to fully wean our three year old daughter.  I know, I know, she is not getting fully nutrition through my milk.   But oh, the closeness, comfort and connection really are priceless.

Yet, I digress.  When consulting Merriam Webster about the term "wean" you meet up with definitions that embody my previous discourse:

1: to accustom (as a young child or animal) to take food otherwise than by nursing

However, the thought behind this post does not surround my three year old, but rather, my parents, my sisters, and myself.  I will spare the sordid details, as they say, but the adults in my family of origin are also embarking on this new "weaning" adventure. And based on the last several weeks, I am not sure that we are all looking forward to this journey. 

The second definition of "wean" is as follows:  
2
:  to detach from a source of dependence wean
ed off the medication> <wean the bears from human food — Sports Illus.>; also :  to free from a usually unwholesome habit or interest <wean him off his excessive drinking> weaning them from habits of violence — Geoffrey Carnall>
 
At this point in our lives, my sisters and I are needing to wean our parents from their independence.  We are inviting them to receive our help, our counsel, in efforts to preserve any semblance of autonomy.  Our dad, who will be 80 in August, is a former marine and top salesman.  Gregarious, social, conservative in political and religious beliefs, he seems like an awkward teenage boy not sure of the right etiquette in his senior years.
 
Mom, a shy closet writer and political thinker, is no longer able to fully recognize her own children in photos.  The clicker is that they are living far away from any of their beloved, who so desperately wish to participate in their lives. 
 
My sisters and I have functioned like a 3 person relay race team.  One of us started us out strong and fast to provide a nice sized lead, the second provided consistency and stabilization, and the third, we are hoping is going to pull us up the rear and bring the gold home.  The gold in this case is gently encouraging our parents, to wean themselves from the lives they have lived for over 28 years and move closer to one of us.  While we see it as merely a change of location, I wonder if my parents see it more as a weaning of the self; a losing of who they are, who they were, and who they were meant to become.  
 
In the case of our mom, she has already begun to wean herself from herself and her life.  Weaning.  I guess its not just for babies.  

Saturday, June 13, 2015

The Unexpected. . . Part 2

We like to think that we know our parents.  The people who brought us up, cared for us when we were young, argued with us in our adolescents.  We just don't expect any surprises from them as we age.  Perhaps we look as them as these immutable, inflexible beings who will always treat us the way that they always have.  While we expect ourselves to grow and change, to move beyond who we are today and to strive to be better, more whole humans, we, well at least I, do not expect the same from the parental unit.

I expect my mom to be picky in her eating habits.  I expect her to get anxious if too much clutter is residing on the kitchen table.  I expect her to move with a lack of confidence in her being.  I expect her to shy away from people.  I expect her to take her life and those lives around her much too seriously, failing to live in the moment. 

From Dad, I don't expect much emotion, unless it is embroiled in the discussion of my errant political views.  I expect Dad to definitively direct the action in the movie of his and my mom's lives, especially when it involves managing the simple day to day activities. 

As a couple who has been together 47 years, I have come to expect a lack of intimacy.  The connection I have come to expect is based more on my mom's agreement with my dad's political and financial views. Yet, I expect that they love each other, and that they love me.

However, my expectations of them, and my perceptions of them as individuals, as a couple, and as my parents have been tossed in a million different directions.

Over the last several weeks, my sisters and I had come to help take care of my Dad after he had some ambulatory issues.  Ironically, these issues merely illuminated how severe some of my mom's memory problems were.

And that brings us back to expectations.  Would I have expected my mom to go and sit next to a woman, smile at her and make small talk at church when all other pews were open?  Would I have expected her and my dad to hold hands multiple times in church? Would I have expected both my mom and dad to start singing along with Andrea Boccelli's "When I Fall In Love" with my mom subsequently asking my dad to dance and then kiss him when they were through?  What about getting both my parents to dance and jump around with me to Neal Diamond's "America" and "Forever in Blue Jeans" in their kitchen? 

We went to church today and part of the homily was that we waste too much time dwelling on the past and worrying about the future.  The present is all we have.  Sadly enough, the present is all that we are going to have with my mom.  Holding her children in her arms, watching her grandchildren blow out birthday candles on their third birthday, or dancing with her husband in their kitchen at dusk on a humid summer night will all be forgotten. While I expect that the next few years are going to be really painful, I also expect that I am finally awake (I love you pointz) to see the blessings of the present.