Skip to main content

Shift of Power

A large part of our family visit to the Northeast this past week has been spent with loved ones who need care. This has been hard on them; they have been role models of caring for others and the shift from offering to needing assistance is hard on the ego. I have begun that transition and I already see in myself that struggle.

Two things are limiting me currently. Firstly, my sleep disorder renders me very groggy at the end of the day. Unless I work hard (ingest caffeinated beverages, splash my face with cold water, etc.) I am not much help then.

Secondly my prosthetic knee has been a godsend but it is not the knee I was born with; stairs will be a difficulty for me the rest of my life. It was shocking to me how little help I was moving my daughter into her second floor apartment.

During the day I try offer my help freely and I'm still not too bad for carrying things on level terrain, such as grocery shopping and unloading, etc.

But if God grants me a long life more and more will need to be done for me. As much as I love my loved ones I am an introvert and constant interaction with others to do simple tasks wears me down.

One thing I note with my elderly relatives is their desire to decide unilaterally how they will be helped. That is something I have to date refused to do because of watching them make it hard to help them. I will always consult with folk aiding me.

I will probably always champion my personal autonomy when folk will act on me without my consent. I will commit to doing so with good humor and affection for those who mean well whether or not they do well. I'll fail, I'll try to do better, that is what living is.

I have a lifetime of problem-solving experience, personally and professionally, for things basic and complex. I can often find win-win approaches to things and have done so when recovering from surgery in the past; I just hope that my loved ones will heed me if not agree with me. It is not a pleasant prospect that they might not and I do empathize with my older relatives.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more