When I first asked my 93 year-old father to move in with me and my family, I knew that there would be a period of adjustment. What I didn't know was just how long that period of adjustment would be. Here it is, years later, and I'm still adjusting.
My father? He's doing just fine.
My father had been the head of his household well into his 80's. Myself, I've been in charge of my own life since I turned 18, when I put what little I remembered from school about geography to use and went to college out of state.
As a kid, I learned early on that no one was allowed to touch my father's morning newspaper until he was finished reading it. And he took a looong time reading it.
"Pop," I would ask him, "can I have the comics?"
"No," he would always answer. My father was a firm believer in brevity.
"Why not?"
"Because I'm not done with it yet."
It didn't matter that he never read the comics, or that I would be done with it by the time he was ready to peruse it for himself, but Dear Blabby was featured in the same section of the newspaper that the comics were featured in, and he liked to read about other people's problems. He couldn't believe that some people were so willing to hang out their dirty laundry to dry where everybody could see.
Myself, I'm not so strict. If any of my kids want to read the newspaper with me, well, I'm just happy that they like to read and enjoy being in my company.
However, when my father first moved in with me, the newspaper quickly became a point of contention between the two of us, because I enjoy reading the paper first thing in the morning, too. But, if he gets to the paper before I do, he's like a dog guarding his bone. Grrr...
Like I said, it's one of those little things that drives me nuts.
How do I deal with it? Well, to tell you that story, I first have to tell you this story: When I was about 12 years-old, and prone to overestimating my abilities, we went on a family vacation to the beach.
"Don't go too far," my mother warned me.
Did I listen? Of course not. I was 12 and I knew everything.
Needless to say, I swam out farther than I should have, and when I tried to swim back I noticed that for every three feet I swam forward, the waves would pull me back four. It didn't matter how hard I swam, I kept being pulled further and further back into the ocean. If I were pulled back any further, I'd have ended up being just another face on a milk carton. Oh, sure, I could have yelled for help, but that would have been embarrassing. Thinking back on it now, I wonder how many swimmers have drowned because they were too red-faced to cry out for help?
But that wasn't what was on my mind when I was treading water, desperately trying to make it back to dry land. It didn't look good. My arms and legs were giving out, and I was getting nowhere fast. Did I survive?
Well, I'm writing this story, aren't I?
What to do? What to do?
"Use the brain God gave you!" I could imagine my father chastising me.
And that's exactly what I did, I used the brain God gave me. I swam with the ocean when the waves were moving forward, toward the beach, and when the waves would move back toward the open sea, I stopped swimming and rested. I made it back to shore eventually, but my arms and legs were trembling from exhaustion. I made it back because I decided to stop fighting the waves and worked with them instead.
And that's what I decided to do with my father, himself a force of nature. I would work with him, instead of fight against him.
So now, on those mornings when I get to the newspaper first, I try to be gracious. I offer my father the sections I'm not reading. On the mornings when my father gets to the newspaper before I do, I choose not to argue or get angry, because it is a choice, after all. Instead, I choose to be patient. Why ruin everybody's day?
My father is 93 years-old. If one of his only pleasures in life is having the morning newspaper all to himself... I can live with that. And some mornings my father will even ask me if I want the comics.
I guess he's learned a few things, too.
Raising My Father
@JimDuchene
JimDuchene.blogspot.com
RaisingMyFather.blogspot.com
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