Posts

What’s in Your Toolbox?

/8 Comments/in /by

Many years ago, my young children gave me a tool kit for Mother’s Day. It contained a small hammer, a Phillip’s screwdriver, a flathead screwdriver, and pliers—each with a blue handle—as well as a measuring tape in a blue case. The tools were nested in a latching box—blue, of course. It ranks among the most meaningful gifts I’ve received. Were they saying they believed I was capable of using tools other than “girl tools,” e.g. sewing machine or mixing bowl? That I could hang a picture and fix stuff myself? And I would always know where the tool I needed was! (Truthfully, I suspect their father suggested it so I would stop being irritated at never being able to find his tools; but, decades later, I’m sticking with “mom is badass.”) I have better tools now (well, actually, I don’t), but I hang onto the blue-handled ones to remind me that, with the right tools, I can step beyond my comfort zone.

I was reminded of the tool set gift as I listened to Michelle Obama’s book, The Light We Carry, in the car last week. Her father lived with multiple sclerosis and walked with a cane, even when Michelle was a young girl. She writes, “. . . that cane symbolized nothing. It was just a tool, the same way my mother’s spatula was a tool in the kitchen, or my grandfather’s hammer got used any time he came over to fix a broken shelf or curtain rod. It was utilitarian, protective, something to lean on when needed.”

When I came to live with my mother, she was 96 and carried an old broom handle when she walked outside. She used it for balance, yes, but I think she wanted me to think it was for (ineffectively) whacking down dandelions that grew in the center of the driveway where she walked, or pushing sticks out of the way. Maybe that was the story she told herself too. She did carry a fancier floral print cane when we went out in public. A few years later, she replaced the cane with a walker; and for a few weeks, after she broke her arm, she replaced the walker with a wheelchair. Mostly, she made the adjustments with grace; well, sort of. She also insisted that she did not need a caregiver, or me; that was a tool too far.

I have supportive tools of my own. I’ve worn glasses since my early 20s. Every few years, I get a new prescription, a tool upgrade. A few years ago, I began using trekking poles when I hiked; I’m on my third set, now, up-trading in quality when the previous ones broke. Then I got ankle braces before putting up the funds for ankle-supporting boots. Later I began using knee straps. These are the tools I need to keep me safe so I can keep hiking as I age. Three years ago, I got hearing aids, the tools I need to function in the world as my hearing diminishes. They symbolize nothing. They are just tools.

Those are physical tools. But Michelle goes on to talk about other obstacles for which tools are needed, like her fearful mind, which makes public speaking scary. (Wait! What? Michelle Obama, who rocked her speech at the DNC, is afraid of public speaking?) She has taught herself to accept that the fear is part of who she is, and by getting to know Fear’s agenda, she can ambush her. Elizabeth Gilbert tells her own fear it can come along on the adventure—since it’s going to anyway—but it has to stay in the back seat, and it can never, ever drive.

When my memoir was published, I said I would never be a guest on a podcast, that was too scary, a challenge too far. Then I was a guest on a podcast. I loved it! I was on several more, and it became my favorite way to talk about my book and caregiving. Had I let Fear drive, I would have missed out. There are two quotes still stuck on my study wall. One, by Michelle, in fact, says, “Am I good enough? Yes, I am!” The other says, “You are an expert on your own experience.” They are my tools, and I read them over and over as I waited for the podcast host to come on my screen.

People ask me if I’m not afraid to hike alone. Sometimes I do feel fear as I plan for a hike on a trail where there might not be other people, or as I drive to a remote trailhead. Once I put my boots on the ground though, I’m nothing but ecstatic; Fear stays in the car. I have my tools: sturdy boots, poles, a whistle, most of the “ten essentials,” knowledge of the trail and of best practices to stay safe; I’ve told someone where I am. I will not let Fear keep me from doing what I love, for as long as I can physically do it.

Aging is a scary new trail too. But there are plenty of tools and guides. Once we identify what it is we are afraid of, we can get to know it. Then we can find the tools we need to banish it to the back seat—again and again if necessary. We cannot, of course, banish aging—try as we might—but we can fend off fear of it. 

 

As always, I would love to hear from you. What tools have you employed to help you through life? What fears—including about aging—do you want to challenge? What have you already conquered? Leave a comment below!

[A note about commenting on a post: Click the subscribe drop down arrow just above the comment section and provide your information (it is private) to receive an email when someone replies to your comment. I, at least, will always reply!]

ReStorying a Life: I Can See Clearly Now

/0 Comments/in /by

(This story first appeared in “Sage-ing with Creative Spirit, Grace & Gratitude: The Journal of Creative Aging”
Number 45, Summer 2023  http://www.sage-ing.com/sageing45.html)

My north star as I became an adult was conflicted. I grew up in the fifties and sixties with my mother’s gender-typical role model, along with those I saw in Father Knows Best, Donna Reed, and Leave It to Beaver. But as I came of age I also witnessed Marlo Thomas’s “working girl” Ann Marie in That Girl, along with Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and bra burning.

I went to college—an expectation of me and my two sisters—but I had been left on my own to uncover passion and develop gifts, and I hadn’t done it. With no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, I chose a major by process of elimination. Post-graduation, I got married and became a full-time wife and mother, if not choosing my mother’s path, falling into it.

At Mt. Rainier, c. 1959

Everything changed when, at forty, my marriage ended. I went to graduate school, but, degree in hand, I still didn’t know how to be a career woman. I floundered as I looked for my niche. I wish I could say I began watching my mother more closely, but the looking glass I kept her in remained clouded by my obstinate refusal to see her beyond my childhood years, or across the 2500 miles that physically separated us in my adulthood.

In my growing up years, my mother had been the action behind the face, hiding behind her introversion and in her understanding of women’s and men’s roles. She was the elected PTA president and did the work, but my father led the meetings. She did the work at our church, but declined to be on a leadership board. She was a Girl Scout leader and Sunday school teacher, mingling with children where she felt more confident and competent.

When my father retired from his illustrious career, she seemingly decided it was her time. She threw herself into activism, changing the persona of the person I thought I knew. She jumped into peace initiatives and gun control, speaking passionately to church and civic groups. She led a charge to save the second growth forest adjacent to our home, defying her “trees are a natural resource” husband before bringing him along with her. Slowly I began to see her in new light as she discovered creative ways to express her long-buried (or undiscovered) passions and overcome her fears.

At the Million Mom March in Washington, D.C. 2000

As I struggled to put together a life and a living, I took my first writing class and started a blog about restoring the garden at the house I bought on my own, honing in on my love of writing. I found a job I could shine in. I re-storied my life. I was thriving. I was busy when my father died, and still not watching my mother courageously continue living on her own. (Later she would say her eighties were her favorite decade.She was seventy-nine when she became a widow.)

And then, at the apex of my own newly discovered confidence and creative living, I moved.

Leaving the garden I had created and returning to my childhood home—and my mother’s garden—on the other side of the country was an act of courage. My mother’s grit as she re-storied her own life after my father died had begun to seep into my consciousness. At ninety-six, though, she was in need of a companion traveler—not that she would admit it. It was a move I had longed for since I left the Pacific Northwest nearly four decades earlier, but I hadn’t envisioned it like this.

Watching her up close for the next six years was an education I could not have gotten in a classroom. As I read letters she and my father wrote to one another from opposite sides of the ocean during World War II, her intrepidness and creativity in putting together an unexpected life as a young woman moved her out from behind the mirror. All these years I had been seeing only my own image in the glass, and yet she was there all along. Through the years we had together until her death, we battled to hold onto the independence we had each come to in the fullness of maturity, unwilling to cede it to the other. They were hard years.

Writing down the story in a new blog was my life-saving outlet. It was where I intersected with the world beyond a stifling existence. As in the garden blog, it was a sharing of my hands-in-the-dirt education with readers.

At home, 2014

Following my mother’s death, I finished transforming my blog posts and journal into a memoir. It was published as autumn morphed toward winter in 2022. Now, for the first time, I am engaging in volunteerism and social activism as I support family caregivers and educate others about the unsung world of family caregiving. Readers of my memoir are finding the courage to take control of their own self-care, even as they care for another. They are giving themselves permission not to do “all the things” alone, to ask for help. They are talking more openly about the struggle that is family caregiving. Perhaps they are writing down their own stories.

In celebration of my 70th birthday in 2022, I turned my passion for hiking—and my newest blog about my outdoor adventures—into a volunteer position at Mt. Rainier National Park, helping others discover and protect the beauty of the natural world. And who modeled that re-storying for me? My mother. She has become my clear and shining north star.

When I returned to my mother’s garden at age sixty, I thought maybe in whatever time we were to have together, I could find the mother I had always wished for: one who would cheer me on with praise, admiration, celebration—pompoms even. Instead, she just kept being who she always had been: the unflinching woman I hadn’t seen clearly any more than I felt seen by her. I began shaking those pompoms for myself, cheering myself on, just as she had quietly championed herself. I look in the mirror now and I see her smiling back. Maybe even a hint of pompom cheering me on.

My mother thought I returned to my childhood home so she could take care of me, rather than vice-versa. And maybe she did. Even now, five years after her death, as I continue living in the home she created, I am still learning from her.

 

 

“NanaNana, Hey Jude”

/0 Comments/in /by

A story of long haul caregiving.

I finished reading Mother Lode this week amid a hail storm of memories. My mother is 96 and living with Alzheimer’s. I have been her part-time caregiver for about fifteen years. Like so many mothers of the Greatest Generation, she is a survivor. Having fought life-threatening cancer three times, starting at age seventeen, it is a miracle she is here at all. Her last battle with cancer, including CyberKnife therapy, left her frail and dying. Her oncologist said to call hospice and that she had four to six months to live. That was almost twenty years ago.

My mom’s memory loss had such slow progression we could almost believe it wasn’t happening. When paranoia and confusion started popping up, I took her to a neurologist. I was with mom each time she was given a memory test so I was able to note the changes along with her doctors. I was with her in the difficult times when she thought someone stole her purse (lost and found at Safeway), stole $50 (found hidden in a tissue at the bottom of her tool box), stole her false tooth (who steals a tooth?), stole her hearing aid (only the right one), etc, etc, etc. . .  I was there when she wandered off at night and was found sitting on a bench outside, lost and cold, in the dark. I was there for hundreds of hilarious and completely maddening “who’s on first” conversations similar to those related in Mother Lode. I was there when she when was taken to the hospital multiple times because she thought the cancer had come back. I was there and made the difficult decision to move her to memory care.

Although I didn’t live with mom, I have been on call day and night for years. Now that she is in a 24-hour memory care center, the chaos has leveled out. We both have some breathing space. Sometimes I worry about my parents’ savings being eaten up to pay for her care, but I believe that’s the best use of the money, and I feel fortunate that she can afford it. If she’s still here when the money runs out, we will figure out what to do. It can’t be harder than what we’ve already been through.

My mother calls this time she is living in now her “grace period.” I think of a grace period like a coda in a musical piece that finishes a song. “Hey Jude,” the Beatles song, has a coda that repeats “nana na na” for four minutes. Mom’s coda happened to come with Alzheimer’s and coincide with my retirement, my buying a new house, moving myself and my mom, and Covid. The last two years have been like a record stuck on “nana na na.” And just when I think I’m going totally crazy, I start singing along.

—Jane W.