Tensions Are Running High
Tensions are running high again. Doesn’t that sound like a Cold War news headline? “Tensions are running high between so-and-so about this-and-that.” Still, that’s what it feels like.
Family members are butting heads because of internal stressors that we have a hard time figuring out how to manage. Dad about the care only he can provide every day. A sister under immense strain for a number of reasons. A sister who feels the guilt of being too far away to help. Me? Losing sleep over mom, dad, and my sisters. Always we circle back to: ”What are we going to do?” With no end in sight.
Dad is actually harder to deal with than my mother, which is going places. Let me explain.
Dad gets good chunks of both Saturday and Sunday to do what he likes, which is a lot more than many caregivers of people with ALZ can claim.
But still, he feels confined. Constrained. My father has always been a wanderer. Always. When I was growing up, it was not unusual for him to be away weekends visiting his parents or brothers in Vermont, or involved in some activity weeknights that took him away from home. He became a long-haul trucker after we all flew the nest, which took him away and left my mother mostly alone. He wanted freedom. To drop responsibilities. To not have anyone telling him what to do. To have a life that didn’t necessarily involve his wife and children all that much. His interests were always outside the family and he wasn’t all that engaged in our school efforts or any of our interests.
Maybe his disinterest was because he had three daughters, although I don’t think three sons would have made much difference. His desire for freedom is part of his character and the gender of his children wouldn’t alter that.
It’s not that he doesn’t care about his family, but he didn’t spend a lot of time cultivating relationships with them. Consequently, he has absolutely no idea how to deal with mom’s paranoia. He actually tries to argue with a woman who has Alzheimer’s as if he will get any kind of rational answer from her or change her mind. My mother will say: “I know why that cat litter is gone. She came here and took it.” My father will then rebut the argument saying, essentially “Don’t be ridiculous. No one has been here.” That in turn agitates her, which in turn agitates him. Catch-22.
He’s rarely won an argument with her in over 60 years, so I really don’t understand why he would try to win one now.
He doesn’t have a clue about how to deflect her with almost anything else or placate her in any way. I’ll admit, it’s one of the hardest things to deal with, at least for me. She comes back to the topic of someone creeping in and stealing again and again and just will not get off it, but if you say, “Well, I think it’s just been misplaced, let’s go look for it.” Or say, “No, I used the rest of the cat litter in the box this morning.“ Or, “Hey mom, I’d like some coffee. Would you make some?” She loves making coffee, incidentally, and it’s one of the few things she can still make, aside from toast so why not let her make it while she still can?
It’s part of the disease, this paranoia and delusion. She can’t help it. It requires a bit of deceit and sleight of hand, like a magician, to deal with her. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes she suspects the trick; she was always less trusting than my father.
Dad is a terrible liar, which isn’t a bad thing, but he just doesn’t get how to manage mom with trickery and he never will, so having arguments with him about the situation with mom is not any more rational than having an argument with her, and this is where the trouble lies.
I’ll admit, while I’m admitting things, that he is driving me crazy. He makes decisions about fairly important things that a child would pause to consider more deeply. At least any child with impulse control. Dad has always been extraordinarily naive about lots of things. It was something my mother said for YEARS “Oh, you are SO naive.” And he was. He was too trusting, almost too innocent, for words. Case in point: Multi-level marketing. He must have been involved with at least three multi-level marketing schemes that all came to naught. You’d think that after the first one, and the inventory he was required to purchase to participate and could never unload, he would have learned that it was all a scam. But no. He had this misplaced confidence that he could make it up the multi-level marketing ladder. He’d try to sell the products to his fellow churchgoers, co-workers, family members, friends, for all I know people passing by on the street, to no avail. We had that crap in the house for decades, it seemed.
This naivete has not abated as he’s grown older. He’s just as trustful and has just as much misplaced confidence as ever, but now he’s pitching to his far more skeptical offspring who don’t buy the pitch. We are our mother’s daughters and are not that naive. Or, if we ever were, outgrew it long ago.
Patience is a virtue, or so it’s said. Right now I’m looking for acceptance in dealing with my dad, rather than patience. I think it comes before patience and is much harder to cultivate.
One thing at a time.
Oooommmm…..
Note: This post was first published in July 2020.