The Cherry Cordial Revolution: Do I help Grandma, or do I follow the rules?
At 96, my Grandma Clara Yeager was pissed. Dad and his siblings sent her to live at Woodbridge Nursing Home. We visited her once a week while Grandma groused at Dad for putting her there in the first place. One day, a nurse took Dad out of the room for a private chat. My sister wasn’t there that day, and Grandma took the occasion to make a request — bring her some cherry cordials. Grandma rarely talked to me, much less made a direct request so I didn’t ask why — my dad returned to the room and it was clear this was secret. Do I help Grandma? Or do I follow the rules and refuse to buy Grandma her cherries?
Telly gawps and the past tense: Loving and caring for a relative who has alzheimers
It happens slowly at first. You notice little things and you make sense of them, you brush them away with a sort of convoluted logic, not unlike a wish, and you assure yourself it can’t really be happening. It is unthinkable, that someone who is so alive, so bright, brighter than almost anyone, could be dimming. Then you notice more things, and what once was unthinkable becomes undeniable, and all you want to do is to stop it, there must be away to stop it! You can’t just stand back and watch them changing, can you?
I like cleaning my house: WTF?! When did this happen?
Somehow, I’ve gone from a person who found herself filled with resentment and rage while cleaning to someone who actually (get this) enjoys doing my chores. Somehow, I now understand the concept of “domestic bliss.” I genuinely don’t know when this happened. Somehow, I’m that asshole who shouts “LAUNDRY ZERO!!” with a sense of genuine accomplishment once all hampers are empty and all clothes are folded. I don’t know how or why this happened, but in the interest of bottling it and sharing it, here are a few of my theories…
On being an aging weirdo
A aging nightlife colleague posted this online recently: “Really need to work on the whole “being fun” thing a little more. It’s too easy to just sit around being comfortable and old.”
I see these kinds of things a LOT from my peer group of aging freaks — right around 30. It seems like all of a sudden it’s staring you right there in the face: the stuff that we spent our 20s doing (in my specific case, dancing all night while intoxicated) suddenly doesn’t have quite the same pull, and there’s part of you that screams NOOOOOOO! I’m getting OOOOOOLD! And then there’s this reflex of MUST FIGHT IT MUST FIGHT IT.
How do you Adult?
I was thinking about this all last night because I’d just signed up for dental and life insurance through my work, and that sort of thing feels really grown-up. Responsibility! Future planning! Insurance! But it also cast into sharp relief the fact that I really don’t know what I’m doing and I’m scared as hell. How do Other People do it?
After the stroke, someone else sits in my grandmother’s body
My grandmother will not be at my wedding. The woman who was always so lively, so patient, and so strong is gone. She will never make me fresh tortillas. We will never again spend a day happily digging in her garden. She will not attend my wedding. The stroke marked her. She has only a little use of her right hand. She tires easily, she loses words in the middle of sentences. She confuses names. The worst part of this is that she knows exactly what the stroke took from her.
Wait, is offbeat Botox a thing?
I’m nearing 40, and while I think aging is pretty cool, and like how I look these days (I’m in better shape than I was in my 20s!)… I don’t like the furrows between my eyebrows. It’s less that they make me look old… and more that they make me look mad! I got a Groupon for Botox and decided I wanted to try it. Afterwards, I told my husband and he got really upset…
What are your relationship’s job titles?
My partner Andreas and I celebrated our 15th hookupiversary last New Years. Next year will be our 10th wedding anniversary. People, we have been together a LONG time. I remember being 22, already chewed up and spit out by two dysfunctional long-term relationships, feeling like I was already so old and jaded and damaged. (Oh, sweet baby Ariel! Adorable!)
15 years later, we’ve had a lot of time to figure out what works best for us in our relationship. About five years in, we realized that our relationship responsibilities generally fell into these job titles:
I was the Director of Logistics. He was the VP of Emotional Support.