February 24, 2005 – Confronting a Tough Choice

February 24, 2005 – Confronting a Tough Choice

I spoke by phone with my Dad over the weekend. As he has gotten older, over 80 now, we seem better able to communicate. You go through this continual evolution in how you relate to your parents. Childhood is all about rebellion, pushing the limits of what you can get away with, and finally escape from their control and domination. What I found is that though I was able to leave, I was never completely free from the influence they exercised over me. The connection was embedded in the very substance of us all. I know that now, having two children of my own. The umbilical cord stretches over infinite space and even time. I suspect it extends to reach into death and beyond. I’m sure that my grandmother and great grandmother, both strong forces in my father’s life continues to extend their control—he is of them and their spirit still resides in his being.

Into adulthood, you begin to believe that you can remake yourself into someone completely different from your parents—a person more urbane, more open-minded, more whatever. And to some extent this is all possible. My life with my wife and children was vastly different from what I remembered as a child growing up with my parents. Watching my grandchildren, I can see the same is true for their lives relative to the lives their parents had growing up in our household. But those are all superficial things: credit cards to finance interruptions in cash flow versus pawn shops that were the financiers for my folks; television serving as electronic nannies to our children versus videos doing the same job for our grandchildren, public telephones for our generation, cell phones for our children.

The really important things are still the same and probably have been since people first formed communities and began living in family units. How do you get you child through each of the major hurdles in their lives as they grow up as part of your family and how do you help them over the hurdles once they form families of their own? Recently, my youngest sister called on my parents for help with a crisis she was going through and my parents responded in the same way they did when she was a child at home. My father complained mightily about my sister’s choices in life, but when she asked for help, he came to her aid. I completely understood this act on my father’s part when our youngest daughter experienced a similar life crisis and came to us for help and we reacted the same way as my father did coming to her aid. You never stop being parents.

Surprisingly, for my 80+ year-old father, he is still up to the challenge of being the patriarch of his family. Despite his reconstructive surgery to repair aging joints in hip and knee, that to this day continues to frustrate his desire to ambulate in the manner he did before both procedures, he continues to endure, to be the parent he is expected to be. He is somewhat of a problem solver for the community of peers around him. When he was more able bodied, he would be their handy man, their financial adviser, and their psychological consultant. He continues the last two tasks but now hires younger more able bodied men or women to provide the handy person services.

He was discussing one of his latest problems with me in our last phone conversation. There have been two women who have been long-time helpers at my parent’s home: “M” and “E”. “M” has been with my parents nearly 40 years. Her daughter was just a bit older than my two girls. She was housekeeper until ten or so years back when a crisis in her life took her back to Mexico for a time. That’s when my parents engaged “E”, who became housekeeper and cook and eventually became the nurse’s aid to my father’s ministering to his long time friend, who died last year. During the period “E” had come into my parent’s lives, “M” returned hoping to have her old job back. My parents took her in providing her work when “E” took on the job of nursemaid to dad’s friend.

Now that there is no invalid for “E” to care for, she has resumed her job with my mother and father and “M” feels displaced, not only by someone competing for her job, but also someone two decades younger competing for her job. My father’s next task is providing some resolution to this conflict. And his choices are equally difficult: “E” who has provided care to a dying friend as well as to my parents and “M” who my parents have known for close to half their lives. When I think of the responsibility that my father faces, I am awed by his ability to persevere. I’m sure I would be able to shoulder the burden but given the choice I would not willingly take it on. How my father will handle the choice is anyone’s guess, but I suspect he will find something that will create the least hurt for all concerned. He seems to have a knack for doing so.