They're Your Parents, Too!

“When my parents got old, my sister was the one helping them. I was really clueless about what was expected of me. I thought I'd escaped my family. Silly me. I had no idea that a new life-crisis was coming and that one way or another, my family would ambush me with my oldest, deepest feelings.”

This begins the article by Francine Russo that I hope to attach for you. She's sharing a little on her book: They're Your Parents, Too! If the link doesn’t work, just search her name on the internet…because if it hasn’t happened to you yet…it’s going to:

Your parents will die.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/francine-russo/supporting-elderly-parent_b_444880.html
(You can also find it on my Face Book page...how I got it there remains a mystery to me!)

Francine was the bystander, looking on (if barely) as her sister did the primary caregiving in her mother’s last years of life.

I was the primary caregiver for my dad in his final months. I don’t know if my siblings would admit to it as they certainly contributed all they could. It was just that I wasn’t working, and I wanted to be there. The day-to-day responsibilities of “managing” Dad’s care, being the point-person for the doctors, having the power of attorney, and my dad’s growing dependence on me, made me “primary” before we’d even adjusted to the idea that Dad was going to die. That first month, when nothing was structured and I wasn’t yet overly tired, was a time full of contentment for me. I felt absolutely great to be able to be “the one” – the one who could provide what he needed – the one who got to be with him.

After that month, I continued with the “day shift” and my siblings took turns coming after work. I don’t know that I could have done what they did – work full time and then add four or five hours to the end of my day. But I got so I watched the clock and was resentful any time one or the other of them was late. I’d inwardly lament that they just didn’t know what it was like to do what I was doing. When they took a night off I couldn’t fathom how their regular lives were still going on or why they remained important to them.

I was caught-up in my dad’s life, so much so that no “regular life” seemed possible until the very end when the birth of my grandson was imminent and there were worries about him being breech, and my daughter broke out in a rash, and there were showers to attend. It just about killed me to drag myself away and to focus on something else – even when it was as important as the first-born child of my partnerless daughter – and my first grandchild.

I started this piece wondering if it could have been different for me if only I’d realized it is totally in my nature to get immersed; to want to focus on one primary and essential thing; to be devoted. That’s me. To do anything else wouldn’t have suited me at all. I would have wanted to push my siblings out of the way if they wouldn’t have let me be the daily companion I got to be. If I’d realized more fully then that this was “me,” my way, exactly and precisely the only thing I could do, I suspect it would have gone better for all of us. I might have stayed in contentment and not veered to difficulty and resentment as I did. On the other hand, it might not have mattered. As each week passed there seemed more to deal with and I got more exhausted. Feeling physically and emotionally drained was what really led me to want more support.

I wanted other people to be responsible for their stuff, and to even pick up the slack of mine so that I could do my dedicated thing. I felt the same way when receiving A Course of Love. My cry could have been, “Just let me alone to do this! Free me please, from everything else, so I can be immersed.” Well, let me tell you, there’s not often someone around to do that for you.

I’ve got a sibling who could make a docile cow nervous and my dad still wanted him around. While I accepted that, I also could have accepted that he couldn’t do what I could do…and if he knew himself, maybe he could have too…maybe he even did. It’s just that if people realized their gifts, the one who thrives on doing a bunch of running around could fill the gas tank of the one content to sit at the bedside all day, buy you a take-out meal, or just be really damn prompt for their hour…because you’re not a saint…you’re merely good at being calm and quiet for longer stretches of time than most, which doesn’t mean that at the end of the day you don’t feel as if you can’t breathe the stale air of the sick room one minute longer than the minute in which you’re awaiting release, or that you still don’t need to get laundry done at home.

The kind of person you need as a “primary” has time and this tendency toward dedication…but it doesn’t mean secondaries are any less needed or of any less value, or that they care any less. It takes all kinds, and what a difference it would make if everyone realized it and we each got appreciated for what we can give.

It eventually makes you wonder about your own responsibility in the whole thing.

I wonder if I got so practiced on the inner skills that I let the outer ones get rusty (if I ever had any), and I wonder how much of a problem this is with others…if there’s anyone out there like me. A lot of our ability to rest easy with what we’ve gained on the inside takes place in the inter-personal area of relationships where many of us have spent little time getting much practice.

As baby-boomers we’re called the “sandwich generation” for being caught in the middle between kids who don’t grow up and parents who live too long. Driving my old guy client one day, he wondered why stop signs (and other signs too) are as small as they are, and I thought it was a great question. The darn things weren’t created for eighty-year-olds with poor eye-sight is the only answer I can think of. There’s never been a generation of them to worry about before. This is all new stuff. People simply didn’t live this long and, if they did, they weren’t out driving. Now they are.

We’re breaking new ground, not just in the areas of spirituality and higher consciousness, but on every social, cultural, and familial scale there is. Where do we fit? How do we find space in the sandwich for our own lives? How do we honor our own nature as well as that of those near and dear to us? How do we learn to share responsibilities, not get overly burdened, ask to be treated respectfully, set our own limits, or change our attitude so that we don’t end up doing either the martyr thing or the escape thing? How do we change our own response?

Maybe there aren’t too many others out there who are as naïve as me about this kind of thing. But I still think it comes down – somehow or other – to knowing ourselves and looking honestly at our gifts and those of the people around us. It changes the whole idea of equality. I’m really not sure you can parcel out time or care in equal shares. That’s looking at “an issue” from within the same old box we’re used to looking at issues from, the one where differences aren’t appreciated.

I mean, my sister and my dad danced. How cool is that?

There truly is a radically new nature to A Course of Love and all the messages that tell us to be true to ourselves. They may sound like old messages that have been around forever, but there’s a twist this time around, a twist caused by the new circumstances and time in which we’re living. Not just the economic facts of two-worker families and no one having time, but the fact of the shift of consciousness and how it translates to daily living and the very real and urgent, (if temporary) needs of people in transition (including us).