Later Life & Caregiving Archives - Page 12 of 13

I Don’t Know What I Like Anymore

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Someone asked me at a dinner party what I do for fun and I could not answer.

Not because I had nothing to say. Because I had not been asked that question in so long that I had lost track of the answer. Fun had not been a category I was tracking. Pleasure had not been a budget line. The things I did outside of work were recovery, were maintenance, were the minimum necessary investment in the body and the relationships that kept the machinery running so I could go back to the work. Fun is what you do when you are not preparing for something. I had always been preparing for something.

I said: I walk. I like to walk.

Which is true. But it is also the safe answer, the answer that sounds like a hobby without requiring me to have thought about it, the answer that asks nothing of me in the way that a real answer would ask something of me, would require me to know myself well enough to say: this is what brings me joy, this is what I do not because it is useful but because it feeds something in me that nothing else quite feeds the same way.

I am working on the real answer.

I am taking it seriously the way I took my work seriously, which is the only way I know how to take things. I have signed up for the ceramics class I said I would do for fifteen years and never did. I have started reading novels again, slowly, without the guilt that used to accompany any reading that was not directly relevant to the thesis or the course prep or the committee work. I am learning that the novel is not procrastination. I am learning that the afternoon spent on a novel is not an afternoon I failed to use.

I liked painting once. When I was young, before I learned that my time was for other things. I am thinking about painting.

I am thinking about what it means to make something with no deadline attached to it, no evaluation, no rubric, no one waiting for it to be done. To make something just to see what comes out. To not know yet whether I am any good and to make it anyway, for the making itself, because the making itself turns out to be the point.

I am learning to have hobbies like a person who deserves them.

I think that is what I am actually doing with the ceramics class.

I Defined Myself by What I Carried

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Strip the carrying away and what is left.

That is the question I have been sitting with since the last box went into the car and the keys went back and the lanyard with the photo that made me look like I had not slept, which was accurate, went into the donation bin because who would want it and what would they do with a laminated image of a woman in a role that no longer exists.

I carried so many things.

I carried courses and grade books and the particular weight of a student who is struggling and does not want you to know. I carried other people’s deadlines and my own, always my own, always the next one, always the preparation for the class that was three days away or three hours away or thirty minutes away and there was always something to be done to be ready, there was always a way to be more ready than you currently were.

I carried the performance of it. That is what no one talks about. The carrying of appearing to carry it well. The years of walking into rooms and setting your face into something competent and calm because the students needed that, because the department needed that, because you had decided long ago that your uncertainty was not the institution’s problem and so you held it yourself, quietly, in the place between your shoulder blades where the tension lived.

And now I am standing in my own kitchen on a Tuesday with nowhere to be and nothing due and nothing waiting for my name on it and the question is not whether I can rest.

The question is whether I know who I am when I am not the one doing the carrying.

I am finding out.

Some mornings I walk to the water and I carry nothing except my own body and the habit of noticing, which was always mine before it was the institution’s, the noticing was always mine, and I think: there you are. There is the part of you that was there before the carrying began. The part that watched the light move across the floor as a child and thought, without any words for it yet, that this was enough. That this was the whole thing.

I am learning to live in the empty hands.

I am learning that empty is not the same as lacking.

I Am Becoming Her

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I said something to a friend last week and stopped mid-sentence because my mother had said it first.

Not the words. The way. The particular rhythm of it, the way the thought built and turned at the end, the way I used my hands for emphasis the way she uses her hands, the way the sentence landed with a kind of gentle absoluteness that does not ask to be argued with. I heard her in my mouth and stopped.

My friend said: what?

I said: nothing. And then I finished the sentence.

I spent a long time not wanting to become my mother.

That is not a criticism of her. It is the truth of a certain kind of daughter in a certain kind of era, when the message was that your mother’s life was the template you were supposed to exceed, that becoming her was a failure of ambition, a failure of progress, a settling. I absorbed that message and did not fully question it until I was old enough to see what it was doing to my relationship to myself and to her.

She is eighty years old and she has been brave in ways that no one documented. She raised children without a safety net. She worked without anyone tracking her contributions. She loved in the hard years with a stubbornness that I understand now as a form of courage even when I did not understand it as a child.

And I am becoming her.

Not the whole of her, not the parts that were shaped by things that happened to her that I did not inherit, not the silences she kept because her generation kept them. But the way she pays attention. The way she notices what matters. The way she still laughs at her own jokes before she finishes them, which I also do, which my children find embarrassing in the same way I found it embarrassing, which I hope my children inherit because it means you find yourself genuinely funny and that is not nothing.

I am becoming her and I have stopped being afraid of it.

I am, slowly, becoming grateful for it.

I Am Allowed to Take Up Space

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have been small for a long time.

Not physically. In the way a woman learns to be small. The apologies before the opinions. The hedging before the knowledge. The shrinking that happens in certain rooms, not all rooms, not always, but the rooms where a woman with a strong view is received as a woman with an attitude, where competence reads as arrogance and directness reads as aggression and the simple act of knowing what you know and saying so requires a degree of social management that men in the same room are not required to perform.

I have paid the smallness tax for most of my adult life.

I paid it in the institution. I paid it in the committee rooms and the performance reviews and the conversations where I was told I was a strong candidate in the tone of voice that means: but. Where I was told I was too much in ways that were never said directly because saying them directly would have required an accountability that the room was not prepared to offer. Too direct. Too confident. Too clear about what I wanted. Too unwilling to perform uncertainty I did not feel.

I am done paying.

Not with anger. The anger has had its turn and done its work. Just with the plain and undecorated understanding that I am a woman at this point in her life who knows what she knows and is not going to pretend otherwise for the comfort of rooms that are made uncomfortable by women who know things. I will be kind. I will be precise. I will not be small.

I am allowed to take up the space my thoughts actually take up.

I am allowed to sit in a chair and occupy it fully. I am allowed to have a view and hold it without the apology that was supposed to make the view easier to swallow. I am allowed to be right in a room and not minimize the being right to protect the feelings of the people who are wrong.

This is the freedom I did not know was available.

Not the freedom from difficulty. The freedom from the performance of smallness. The freedom to be the size of myself, in whatever room I am in, for the rest of my life, without apology, without management, without the daily exhausting cost of being less than I am so that others can be more comfortable than they deserve.

I am here. I am this size. I intend to stay.

I Am Learning to Live in a Slower Body

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The body has opinions now.

This is new. Or rather: this is new in the sense that it is louder now. The body has always had opinions, I know that, the body was always registering things, the tension in the shoulders and the jaw and the held breath of a woman who learned early that her body was a tool for other people’s use and a tool does not have opinions. But now the opinions are harder to override. The knee says: not yet. The back says: not like that. The whole body says, on certain mornings: slower.

I am practising listening.

This is harder than it sounds for a person who spent decades treating the body’s complaints as obstacles to be managed. Who took the ibuprofen and did the thing anyway. Who pushed through because the thing needed doing and the body was not the point, the body was infrastructure, the body was the vessel that got you to where the real work was happening.

The body was always the real work happening. That is what I know now.

I walk to the water in the morning and I walk slowly. Not because I cannot walk faster but because I am trying to be in the walk rather than beyond it. I am trying to feel the ground under my feet as information rather than resistance. I am trying to arrive at the water instead of simply appearing there. The arriving matters. I spent so long appearing places without arriving that I am having to learn the difference from scratch.

A slower body knows things a faster one misses.

The particular light at seven in the morning that is different from the light at eight. The sound the gravel makes underfoot when you are moving slowly enough to hear it. The way the cold gets into your hands if you do not put them in your pockets and how the cold in your hands is just cold, not a problem, just the temperature of the world registering on your body, which is alive, which is still here, which is slower and more particular and more present than it has ever been.

I am learning to live in this body rather than managing it.

I am learning the difference.

Her Voice on the Phone

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have been listening to it my whole life.

Not always consciously. The way you listen to something that has always been there, the way the sound of a river is something you hear when you arrive at it but stop hearing once you are living beside it, absorbed into the background of the ordinary, always present, not noticed until the moment you imagine it absent. I have been hearing her voice my whole life and I have not always been hearing it, and I am trying now to hear it, the way you try to hear the river once you understand it will not always be there.

The specific quality of it.

The way it rises at the end of a question that is not really a question, that is an invitation, that is saying: I want to know what you think about this and I am making it a question to give you room to disagree. The way it goes dry when something is funny and she does not want to be seen to find it funny before you do. The way it slows when she is tired, which I can detect now with a precision I did not have at thirty, which comes from decades of calibration, from knowing the version of her voice that is clear-day and the version that is not-quite-today and the version that is: I am glad you called.

I am glad she called.

Every time. Even the calls that are disorienting, where the voice is the same voice but the words have come loose from their moorings, where she calls me by the wrong name or cannot find what she is reaching for and I can hear the reaching, the slight pause that is the gap where the word should be, the way she navigates around it or stops and waits for me to come to where she is. Even those calls. The voice is there. The voice is still hers in all the ways that matter, the quality and the warmth and the particular frequency that has been the frequency of home my entire life.

I pick up every time.

Not out of duty. Out of the understanding that the calls are numbered now, not the calls this week, but all the calls, the total remaining, and I do not know the total but I know it is a number rather than infinite, and every call I pick up is one I have, one that is in the record, one more instance of her voice in my ear saying my name in the voice that means: you are mine and I am glad you exist and I am calling because you are the one I call.

I pick up. I always pick up. I will always pick up.

Her Furniture in My House

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We moved some of her things when she moved into care.

Not everything. The new room has its own dimensions and the dimensions are smaller and not everything she had fits, which is its own kind of loss, the loss of the full context, the way a life reduced to a single room loses the furniture that held the evidence of itself, the chair that was always in the corner and the lamp she has had since before I was born and the small table where she always kept her tea and her book and the reading glasses she was always looking for.

The chair is in my living room now.

I moved it there because it would not fit in storage without damage and also, honestly, because I wanted it near me, wanted the object that held the shape of her daily life in my daily life, wanted to be able to look at it from the couch and feel the particular quality of a thing that carries someone’s use in it, that has been sat in so many times it holds a particular give that is hers, that receives my weight differently than it received hers but is still, unmistakably, her chair.

I have not sat in it.

I am not ready to sit in it. Maybe I will be someday. Maybe the sitting in it will feel like a continuity rather than a taking-over, like inhabiting something she is still alive to have given me, like receiving a thing while the giver is still present to see the receiving. For now I let it be hers. I let it stand in my living room as her chair, not mine, a piece of her life installed in my life with her permission, because she said: take what you want, take what you can use, I am glad if it is useful. She was always like that. Practical about the things, sentimental about the people. Practical about the chair. Knowing I would be the other kind about it and finding that fine.

Her lamp is on my bedside table.

I turn it on every night. The light it makes is the light from her room, her specific warm lamp-light that has been the light of her bedside table for forty years. I turn it on and I read under it and I am in my room and also, somehow, briefly, in hers. Both rooms at once. The light making the connection that geography no longer makes for us. Both of us, reading, in the same warm light.

Grandmother

Reading Time: 2 minutes

No one told me it would feel like this.

Not the books or the friends who went before me or the cultural mythology of grandmotherhood, which I had always found slightly suspect, slightly too wrapped in soft focus and rocking chairs and the implication that a woman’s final and truest purpose was to be someone’s soft place to land. I had resisted that version. I had watched my own mother become a grandmother and been moved by it but kept a certain analytic distance from what it might mean for me, what it would feel like from inside, what would happen in my body in the moment of it.

And then she was placed in my arms.

Six pounds and twelve ounces. Her face a concentrated declaration of presence, already entirely herself, already making it clear that she had arrived with opinions and intentions and a set of needs she was prepared to communicate without hesitation. I held her and she looked in the direction of my face with the unfocused gaze of the newly born and I felt something move through me that I do not have the right word for, something that was love but not the love I already knew, a different frequency of it, older somehow, more cellular, more ancient, as if the love for a grandchild goes to a part of you that was built before you were you.

I thought: she will not remember this.

She will not remember being held on this afternoon in this light by this woman who is already entirely changed by holding her. And that is fine. That is more than fine. The remembering is mine to do. The carrying of this moment is mine, and I will carry it, I will carry it as long as I carry anything, I will carry it into rooms she is not in and bring it out when she needs to know that she was loved before she knew she was being loved, completely, without conditions, by someone who had been waiting without knowing she was waiting.

I understand my mother differently now.

I understand the particular softness she has always had for my children that was different from her love for me, not more, not less, but differently shaped, the love that skips a generation in the way that some traits skip a generation, arriving in a new form that surprises everyone including the person feeling it.

Hello, I said to the six pounds and twelve ounces.

Hello. I have been here the whole time. I am so glad you finally came.

Her Good Days

Reading Time: 2 minutes

On the good days she is entirely herself.

On the good days she knows where she is and when it is and she looks at me with the eyes that know me, that have known me since before I knew myself, and she says something sharp and funny and slightly irreverent in the way she has always been slightly irreverent, the particular dry observation of a woman who has been watching people for eighty years and has strong opinions about what she has seen and has never lost the willingness to say so.

I have learned to receive the good days without clutching them.

That has been the practice. The good day comes and the first instinct is to hold on, to grip it, to look at her being sharp and present and herself and think: stay, please stay, let this be the new permanent, let this clarity be the sign that the fog has lifted and will not return. And the clutching ruins the good day. The clutching turns the gift into a vigil.

I am learning to just be in the good day.

To sit with her on a Tuesday afternoon when she is clear and funny and present and let the afternoon be an afternoon, let her be her, let myself be her daughter in the uncomplicated way I could be her daughter before the complication arrived. To drink the tea and hear the irreverent observation and laugh the way I laugh when she makes me laugh, the real version, the version that starts in my chest and arrives in my face before I can prepare it for company.

She made me laugh on Thursday.

About something that I will not put here because it belongs to the two of us and the Thursday afternoon and the particular quality of her voice when she is sharp and in full command of the thing she is saying. It belongs to the good day. I am keeping it there.

I will tell you this: I drove home from that Thursday and the driving was different. Lighter. The kind of drive where you arrive at your destination without quite knowing you were on the road, because you were somewhere else, somewhere warm, somewhere that had been the good day and was still the good day even though the day was over.

I am so grateful for the good days. I am learning to be only grateful, not watchful. Only there. Only hers.

He Is Finding His Way Back to Me

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We got lost somewhere in the middle years.

Not dramatically. Not with a rupture or a crisis or the kind of event that makes a clear line between before and after. We got lost the way people get lost when they are busy, the way two people can be in the same house and raising the same children and managing the same life and still be drifting, slowly, away from the frequency they used to share, until one day they look at each other over the dinner table and realize they have been having the logistics conversation for months and do not remember the last time they had the other kind.

The children leaving made us face each other again.

There was nowhere to look except at each other and what I saw when I looked was someone I had let get partly unfamiliar, someone who had been changed by the same years that had changed me and who I had not been watching closely enough to track the changing. He was different. I was different. We were different together than we had been, the differences accumulated quietly over years while we were both facing outward, and the question was whether the different-together was still a together.

He came back slowly.

Or I did. Or we both did, toward each other, across the distance the years had made. He started asking me things again, not the logistics, the other things, the things that require you to actually look at the person you are asking, to be interested in the answer, to have a conversation rather than a coordination. He started noticing things and saying so. He started laughing at my jokes in the particular way that tells you someone has actually heard you, not politely, actually.

I have been moving toward him too.

Making room for the version of him that arrived after the middle years, the one that is quieter and more certain and less interested in performing anything and more interested in the actual texture of a Tuesday than he was at forty. I like the Tuesday version. I like the version of him that has been through things and is still here and still choosing this, still finding his way back to me across whatever distance the years put between us.

We went to bed early last Wednesday. We talked until midnight. We were not tired when we stopped. We stopped because the day needed to end.

I had forgotten we could do that. I am glad we still can.