Strategically Placed Toilet Plunger

Rereading my last post, I see that I conflated two things and maybe was too hard on myself regarding my advocacy for my mother. Being rude to a faceless customer support person is not good and it’s also not the same thing as pointing out that my mother has been sitting in her wheelchair outside the door of her apartment for three hours waiting for someone to help her into bed, and she is now weeping. That happened multiple times.

I’m sure the people who took care of my mother were thoroughly sick of me by the time our era there ended, or maybe they always understood completely where I was coming from. I never said to any caregiver, “You’re doing a terrible job and also your shoes are ugly.” But I did point out every last thing that was not right. I was not a jerk; I was exacting and unrelenting, though perhaps there is not a definite line to be drawn between those two things.

They heard from me way more than they probably heard from any other family member because I was there on average 2.5 hours a day for more than two years (that is, five hours a day fifty percent of the time), which gave me ample opportunity to observe things going wrong. Then there was the special situation of our having way more private caregivers with Mom than any other resident had, which gave rise to endless conflicts between the private caregivers and the staff caregivers. I spent many, many hours dealing with those conflicts. Perhaps if I had it to do over again, I would not have leapt into the middle of those situations and just left it to the manager of the private caregivers. All of this back and forth about who did what never went well, though at the least the private caregivers knew I had their backs.

The facility always had a complaint about the private caregiver up their sleeve and ready to deploy when I mentioned anything a facility person had done wrong and it of course never improved the relationships between the two particular people, or the two groups in general. A couple of times, it noticeably made things worse. Now and then, a private caregiver mentioned that a given staff member was unfailingly kind and helpful to them, which always made that staff member rise in my estimation.

I will say I was left with the definite impression that the facility staff had behaved more poorly than the private caregivers, declining to do things they were responsible for and which we were paying a lot for because why should they when there was a private caregiver sitting in a recliner in Mom’s room? They were also routinely blatantly rude to the private caregivers, for instance, refusing to speak to the private caregiver when they let them in the door of the unit at the beginning of their shift.

I can see how it would be annoying to be working like a dog for $16 an hour while someone else is sitting in a La-Z-Boy for that same $16 an hour, and at times even snoozing, but the facility was still responsible for all of the tasks we were paying for. ($16 an hour is not what we paid. I think our hourly rate was $35.) We were perfectly happy to pay someone to sit in a recliner and watch TV and even take a little nap now and then because it meant they were there when Mom had something to say, and could tell us later what it had been. We did not want Mom to feel alone.

One private caregiver said one day that Mom had asked, “Want to hear me sing?” Which indeed the private caregiver did want to hear!

At a certain point, our mother was clearly five years old again in her mind. She told me once that her brother’s name was “Ricky” (rather than the Richard he has long been known as) but when I said I knew that, she said, just like the Mom of any era, “You didn’t know that.” 

So I guess if I had it to do over again, I might just be more aware of my underlying attitude when reporting problems. Often I had a knee-jerk response, which went unnoticed by myself and therefore unquestioned, that the person who had let my mother’s prescription medication run out—this happened multiple times—was a bad person as opposed to a lovable yet fallible human being like myself who was doing the best she could.

Maybe I would let some percentage of things go unmentioned. And maybe I could have tightened up how I described things, avoiding the phrase “all too often” and just saying specifically what had happened.

The time or two when I was genuinely and rightfully enraged, I communicated that in a way I did not have to regret later.

Rereading another recent post, I felt a little embarrassed about complaining about bad listeners. For continuing education for work, I just started reading The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships (Third Edition), by Michael P. Nichols, PhD, and Martha B. Straus, PhD.

I did often feel that I wished someone had responded another way, and I did have a couple of outstandingly bad experiences, including one when a friend laughed heartily throughout an anecdote that turned on my father’s death and one in which my therapist laughed heartily in response to a story about someone dying, of which I had many, because about 30 people died in the course of two years: my mother, my father, my Uncle Joe, my Uncle David, my landlord, three friends, the spouse of a friend, my neighbor who was murdered and about 20 other people I came to know and like—even love—who lived in memory care.

I have become gun shy about telling people important things, which is not a good feeling; that is what I meant when I said I feel fundamentally alone. I am not very far into this book, but one of their main points is that it is nourishing conversation—talking and listening—which makes us feel connected to each other, and that if there are problems, it is not because the other person needs to change. (That cannot be right!) Also, it is helpful if you received attuned listening from your parents when you were a child, which I did not. It makes it harder if you didn’t learn that other people will listen to you and care about what you have to say, but presumably improvement is always possible. Or at any rate, there are a lot of people in that same boat.

The authors also point out that X number of enthusiastic responses via text message are probably not as satisfactory as one direct conversation—on the telephone counts—where you feel heard.

So I retract “I’m surrounded by crappy listeners” and offer the restatement “I have had some difficult exchanges in the recent extraordinarily difficult years and can feel the effects of those, and I understand that I did not receive as a child that which would have made me feel confident that others care about me and that I am lovable, but it is my responsibility to figure out how to invite and conduct nourishing conversations, and even if I am not great at this now, I can get better at it.” That’s what I meant to say.

I left Ypsilanti yesterday morning after readying the house for interior painting. There are certain pieces of furniture that I must have moved five times by now: from the house to the retirement community, from the retirement community back to the house, out of the way for the estate sale, back to where it is needed, out of the way for painting …

It was excessively hot and humid, as it had been the day before. My flight at DTW was delayed because the air conditioning on the plane broke and the interior heated up to possibly 110 degrees, per the announcement in the airport, and so they had to use something else to cool the plane off, which took half an hour or so.

As usual, I was sitting next to the most delightful people on the plane, a pair of retired physicians traveling to a medical conference and to see family. By the end of the flight, the wife and I were clutching each other’s hands to emphasize various points. Ironically, Delta way overshot on the cooling, and we were freezing for the whole flight.

It was wonderful to see Marvin and Duckworth, to sleep in my own bed, and to wake up in the beautiful California sunshine.

My downstairs neighbor sent a little video of her package from Chewy being stolen: A shiny white SUV with a bicycle on its rear rack pauses in front of our building, an elegant-looking woman in a white dress and high heels hops out, clatters across the sidewalk, grabs the big box, and hops back in the car, which rolls off.

The neighbor graciously said that, though it didn’t look like it, maybe the people were under economic duress and that she hoped they enjoyed all the stuff she had picked out for new cat. I was picturing the people opening the box and saying, “Oh, this is for a cat!!!” Then they probably called Chewy to say they had ordered iguana stuff but received cat stuff and wished to demand a refund as well as a million dollars to compensate them for emotional anguish.

This morning I had breakfast while admiring the view out the window: lots of peeling paint, a trash chute, and a carefully balanced toilet plunger. In Ypsi, I have to look at lots of greenery and my father’s daylilies, one blooming after the other, but maybe I can put a toilet plunger out there where it will always be in view.