The biggest challenge of caretaking is the how reactive one needs to be, and how proactive.
It’s my parents house and my parents life. They have habits and needs, and that makes them comfortable. I need to be aware of those habits and needs and facilitate them, just take care of them.
It’s a very reactive life, reminding me of taking care of sister’s dog in his last days, who, the closer he got to leaving this world, just wanted what he wanted when he wanted it. If it was raining and he needed to go, well, he needed to go. I was taking care of him, and we went. I remember helping dig his grave, getting blisters on my hand while breaking up the earth with a long iron pipe as her ex shoveled out the newly loosened dirt, and my sister noted that I took care of her dog until the end.
On the other end of that hypersensitivity, though, is the obligation to get out and lead, to be proactive in creating a space for them, and yes, maybe a space for me. When you are a mom, you are in charge, it’s your house, and you set the space, and the kids find their empowerment around that space. That’s not the same for caretakers, who have an obligation to maintain the routines and structures of previous ownership.
When people move out of their own house, well, things change, be the destination a child’s house or a residence of some sort, but in their house, well, hard.
So I keep getting told to take the lead, at least in my life, but I keep getting the expectation not to be too challenging, not to shake things up too much, so that life can be conventional & easy for people who are not nearly as fast to take change as they once were, and even that speed may never have been fast.
So I have to take charge, and I have to be reactive, and I have to figure out that balance by myself.
I took charge of the laundry from the trip, because my father wouldn’t fill the laundry baskets put out near where I carried in and set their suitcases. But in that, I screwed up, washing some shirts that were just tried on and assigned to my brother’s foster child. They looked new and fresh, and now they look worn and washed, and that’s not good, as I have been told.
This is the challenge exactly. Taking charge means screwing up, but just being responsive with a kind of hypersensitivity, well that’s hard too.
Reactive and proactive at the same time, making good without ownership. Hard.
