Family Squeeze (2 page)

It’s not easy taking my problems one
at a time when they refuse to get in line
.

A
SHLEIGH
B
RILLIANT

How far you go in life depends on being tender with
the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with
the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong—because
someday you will have been all of these
.

G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON
C
ARVER

O
ne of the most profound prayers I have ever prayed is “Help!”

Sometimes it’s as simple as “Help, I cannot find my left shoe.”

Or “Help, I cannot find my passport, and I’m second in line.”

But lately the prayer has been increasingly desperate, uttered through clenched teeth, because I feel like a pair of wet swim shorts about to be squeezed through one of those ancient wringer washing machines.

On my forty-fourth birthday—the same day Mick Jagger turned sixty-three—I dragged myself out of bed to take my younger son golfing. I could think of no better reason to get up and face old age.

As we strolled the course together, whacking a little white ball and
sometimes kicking it, Jeff informed me that he was thinking of buying a Ford Mustang and dating a pretty girl. I threw him a Charles Manson look and said I was considering pushing him in the creek. The child lives life like he golfs: carefully planning his attack, then lunging at things and whapping them.

After tallying our scores, we drove to visit my mother, who needs me, among other things, to finish sentences for her. They don’t prepare you for this in college. You learn of ancient languages and philosophy, but there’s no course on what to do when your mother insists that your son’s iPod is her hearing aid.

As we visit, Mom hands me her “baby”—a blanket scrunched, twisted, and spilled upon by numerous patrons of the long-term care facility where she now resides. Few know that she was once the author of many books, adored by her children and a dozen women who still call her Mom and mentor. The years have been kind to her relatively unwrinkled face, but her memories are distant now, her mind perpetually fuzzy, frantic at times, like she knows things I don’t and wonders if she should burden me with them.

She leans forward, eager to ask me something. “Is your wife—you know—pregnant?”

Jeff snorts.

“No, Mom, not that I know of.”

“Did the divorce go through?” It is one of her longer sentences.

I shake my head and smile. I, her lastborn son, who has been married to his high school sweetheart since the advent of disco.

While nursing Mom’s bundle of blankets, I try to lighten the air with chatter. I tell her of our golf game, of my birthday, which we will celebrate at lunch tomorrow, just the two of us. She is focused on my bald spot now and is holding hands with Jeff.

The boy loves his grandma; loved to sit on her lap as she read to him
when he was toddling. But he never saw the story ending this way. How quickly his face changes from grin to grimace when we visit her. He leans forward and drapes his other arm across her shoulder.

I am holding the baby with one hand and a steaming cup of herbal tea with the other when my cell phone begins playing the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Setting the teacup on a table, I flip the phone open to find things further complicated. Though the connection is bad, I can hear my wife’s desperate voice:

“Phil,” she sobs, “it’s Steve. He—”

And the phone goes dead.

Handing the baby to Jeff, I sprint for the nearest landline, praying my favorite prayer. My mind races to keep up with my pulse.

Steve, the eldest of our three teens, is on a trip overseas, smack-dab in the middle of one of the world’s hot spots. My nightmares of late have been plagued by images of his demise. I dare not think the worst, but now it appears to be upon us. Down the hallway around the corner, I grab the phone but hesitate before dialing.

I suppose this day is a microcosm of our lives the past few years. Dreaming. Dreading. Laughing. Answering the phone a little less eagerly. We are parenting two generations now, wedged between the demands of elderly dependents and energetic teens—neither of whom think you know very much. I attend to my duties begrudgingly at times. I am husband, father, and son. But my resume also includes psychiatrist, doctor, advisor, and Power of Attorney—which, I assure you, does not come with a lawyer’s salary. I feel like a rookie juggler who has been put in charge of ticket sales, concessions, and training the animals too.

Years ago a scholarship sales representative sat us down to threaten us with how much it would cost our kids to go to college. He didn’t mention the price of caring for our parents.

Most weekends find me traveling near and far helping audiences
laugh, telling them where the joy comes from. Yet in those moments of stark honesty I must admit that my stiff upper lip quivers sometimes, that lurking just beneath the smile is a growing sadness. It’s the kind of sadness you feel watching the last sunset of fall, knowing that winter is about to stagger in on you.

I dial the number, expecting the worst. The phone rings, and Ramona picks it up. She is more composed now. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that…Steve called. He has malaria. Sorry, I sort of lost it.”

I am elated. My son has malaria! If I were any good at dancing, I’d break into the salsa right now.

Jeff is talking with Grandma when I return, curling her hands in both of his. Already he has learned one of the secrets to a rich life: In dark times, give off light.

“Everything’s fine,” I tell him. “Steve just has malaria.”

He squints at me like I’ve lost my mind. And since Grandma has lost her hearing, he quietly shares what she’s been saying to him.

“So you’ve been stealing her money, eh?” I laugh. “What money?”

The boy is strong but tender, with eager eyes and a hunger for life. But sometimes I wonder if he’s seeing too much of it, if what might be coming scares him. Sometimes I want to shield my children from life. Yet what do you do? Take them only to movies with happy endings? Never buy them a puppy? At least if your heart gets broken, you’ll know you have one.

Out in the car, I ponder this journey we’ve been on the last few glorious and frantic years. I may not know much, but I do know this: We will walk this road together. I have no idea where it will take us, but just as my parents took time for me, I will take time for them. As surely as childhood is about family, old age is family time too.

I think of a friend’s advice:
Right foot, left foot, breathe
. “Help,” I mutter. “I’m squeezed between my parents and my kids.”

And God speaks with words from my younger son, this gift of God who at times I feel like throttling. “So Mom is a basket case, Grandmas in the loony bin, and Steve has malaria. Other than that, things aren’t bad. Happy birthday, Dad.”

When he talks like this, I want to lock him in a bear hug.

“It could be worse,” I say. “My youngest son could start dating.”

“Maybe,” he laughs, cupping his hand out the window against the oncoming wind.

His laugh has me thinking I can muster the courage to face a birthday cake with forty-four lit candles. Maybe climb out of bed again tomorrow and move my feet, one at a time.

Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous.
When I was sixty-five I still had pimples
.

G
EORGE
B
URNS, WHEN HE WAS ONE HUNDRED

“Honor your father and mother’—which is the first commandment
with a promise—”that it may go well with you
and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

E
PHESIANS
6:2-3

S
omewhere back in the last century, my siblings and I began to face the fact that our parents were aging. We noticed this when we caught Dad backing his Ford Tempo out of the driveway without the aid of mirrors, only to park the car in the flower bed. Sometimes he drove like an Indy racer, and other times farmers on combines would pull out to pass him.

It was as if my once-athletic father, who had been the picture of good health until just after retirement, was kidnapped by those makeover guys on ABC and kept in a room while they dyed his hair, wrinkled his face, and forced him to push a cane around for the rest of his life.

In a matter of months, my dynamic dad seemed to officially enter
old age, waving a sad farewell to baseball with the grandkids and his patriarchal role at family reunions. Instead, he would tire easily, find a sofa, and doze off. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen my father cry, but now the tears came readily as he sat in my green leather chair—the tiger of my youth, now panting under a shade tree.

Ramona and I talked about aging a lot in those days, wondering what role, if any, we should play in Mom and Dad’s lives. Of their five children, I lived the closest, just a ten-minute stroll from their house—the perfect distance when we needed baby-sitting services. But there came a day when Mom and Dad no longer accepted the assignments as eagerly, and when they did, they didn’t move quickly enough to chase the kids from poisonous plants or fast-moving buses. I joked with them about it, saying it’s a good thing we don’t bear children in our eighties; we’d likely fold the strollers before removing the kids.

Though their house was tiny, for them it had grown in size. My mother, who had waged a successful battle with dust and dirt her entire life, finally waved the white flag. Their lawn, once carefully groomed, now required one of those farmer’s combines, not a mower. Through faint tears Dad admitted that things were too big for him now. The only part of the house that was too small was the medicine cabinet. He talked of moving into a seniors’ lodge, where they would experience measured independence but no room for company.

“We want
life
around us,” he confessed. “Old people are like manure. Spread ‘em around and they do some good. Pile them together too long and things start to stink.”

I went to peers for advice. Those who had been through it were bursting with compassion. A few had regrets. The ones with the most advice and the strongest opinions hadn’t traveled this road before. But we all agreed on one thing: 100 percent of living people are aging. And not since the dash on Methuselah’s tombstone signaled 969 years have people lived so long.

When my parents were born, less than one in twenty-five lived long enough to blow out sixty-five candles.
¹
Today, it seems six out of every four do. (Also, 73 percent of the people attending a Rolling Stones concert receive a senior’s discount.) To complicate things further, most of us have two parents and two parents-in-law, so the odds are pretty good that we will carry some responsibility for a dependent parent.

We are also having children later in life. When I was born, my parents were old. So old that I was born in a nursing home. My father had his first heart attack playing peekaboo with me. They were paying for my diapers with pension checks. But this was not the norm. In 1970, the average age of a first-time American mother was 21.4 years.
²
Today, that number has risen to almost twenty-five years
³
(it is twenty-nine in Switzerland).
⁴
Studies conducted in the United States and Canada conclude that close to 30 percent of women between forty-five and sixty-four are supporting unmarried children and elderly parents at the same time.
⁵
In the UK 24 percent of adults aged between forty-five and sixty-four are caregivers.
⁶
The “Me” generation suddenly has to think of others.

One day Ramona asked me a question that I did not appreciate, one that annoyed me to no end: How will we want to be treated when we’re my parents’ age? She believed that we should do unto them as we would have our children do unto us. I asked her where she could possibly find
that
in the Bible.

She mentioned, among other things, the Old and New Testaments, then suggested I read one of the Ten Commandments. I hate it when she does this. In reading the words again, I discovered that eight of the commandments begin with the words
Do not
. Or, if you read the latest translation, “Hey! Enough with…” Only two of the ten are
Dos
, and this is one: “Honor your father and your mother.” The command is not a sin to shun, but a virtue to shoot for. And as far as I can tell,
the command does not end at high school graduation. It continues throughout life.

But what does this honoring mean? When you’re barely out of diapers, honoring your parents includes obeying them and not smashing china. When you’re out of their home, this honor is a trickier thing, but surely it still includes not smashing their china when you visit and being the kind of person who makes a parent of any age say with an upturned grin, “Hey, that’s my kid.”

Like it or not, we live in a culture that has, for the most part, managed to erase the elderly from our minds and consciences. They are an invisible lot, relegated to nursing homes and hospitals, their convenient disappearance seldom the topic of polite conversation. You may recall this bumper sticker: “Support bingo. Keep Grandma off the streets.” I smile when I see it, but I also wonder what we miss by stowing Grandma away.

One day Ramona came to me with a suggestion that I couldn’t believe. “Where do you find
that
in the Bible?” I asked.

“Just about everywhere,” she said.

“But there’s no way it will work,” I protested.

“I think it will,” she said.