From Holiday Guilt and Presidential Powers to Full-out Gratitude

With the holiday spirit hanging in the air---the decorations lighting up the neighborhood nights, the Christmas music and good cheer heard in the stores, the parties lined up on the calendar---it feels like I’m living in an twilight zone. I swing from being genuinely happy in the ho-ho-ho season to feeling guilty about that. Who am I that I get to be light-hearted when so many people in Southern California are losing their homes and livelihoods to raging fires that are destroying thousands-upon-thousands of acres? Who am I that I get to be in my warm, well-lite home when 66% of the people in Puerto Rico are still without power since Hurricane Maria destroyed the island in September? 

FEMA is closing operations in our southern states but their workers aren’t getting a much needed break. They’re headed out to California and you can’t help but wonder how much longer our nation can afford to fund all the natural disasters we’re having back-to-back. If we lose our power grid here in the frozen north this winter, for example, will anyone be here to set up shelters for us? Yet our lawmakers are giving big tax breaks to billionaires thus raising our national debt but when it comes time to balance the budget it will be cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have in their crosshairs. They’ve actually spoke those words out loud and we’re supposed to say, “Oh, well,” and go back to our holiday cheer. If I drank I’d get one of those Virgin Wines Advent Calendar boxes. Open a door every day and pull out a bottle of bubbly.

I am getting whiplash trying to keep up with the changes the current administration is making. This week Trump set things in motion to relocate an embassy to Jerusalem against the advice of virtually every world leader, and he’s radically slashed the size of protected lands in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments by 2 million acres---to the orgasmic delight of mining and oil exploration companies. And Utah is just the beginning. The administration has plans to shrink land in 24 national monuments including in Montana, California, Kentucky, a few states out east and the new marine monument in the Pacific Ocean. The smallest monument park, one in Mississippi that is dedicated to an early NAACP official who was assassinated by white supremacists in the 1960s is already under an acre in size. What possible justification could there be for slashing that national monument land in half other than it being dog whistle gesture to the guys who like to march around with Tiki torches?

Breathe, pace myself. Yes, time to change the topic. One of the commercial blogs I read from time to time had a topic this week titled A Powerful Reason to Give Gratitude During the Holidays and into the New Year. The bottom line, according to the article, is the holidays are often stressful so we need to double down on the act of giving gratitude throughout the day. “Gratitude stimulates your neurotransmitters, the hormones that bring energy and happiness into your living experience.” Or so they claim. Call me a cynic but sometimes I think the wine would work better. 

All kidding aside, I am grateful for the things the Sixty & Me blog article said I need to focus on: the people in my life, my talents and the events in my past that helped make me who I am. Although if I’m to be 100% honest here, I’m still working on being grateful for the latter. Being a widow helped make me who I am. Being my husband’s caregiver for so many years helped make me who I am. Watching my mom die due to a series of human errors helped make me who I am. These events may have made me a stronger person yadda, yadda, yadda but I was pretty happy with myself before I was tested with these challenges. So my gratitude in this area is not written in flowery cursive in a cloth-covered gratitude journey. If I wrote them down at all, I'd write them in pencil so I could erase them from time to time when I’m decidedly ungrateful and I’ve dedicated an hour to a pity party. 

What I am is immensely proud and grateful that I can still feel a full range of emotions, that I still have empathy and a sense of humanity that have not been crushed by Man or Nature. I am also grateful that Time Magazine chose the “Silence Breakers” that launched a global movement against sexual harassment as their ‘Person of the Year’ cover. I predicted it would Tarana Burke, the #MeToo Movement’s creator, and I got that and so much more. Woman Power is back and “the future belongs to those who are passionate and work hard.” Yes, I understand the audacity of quoting that line from Al Franken’s resignation speech in the context of the Time’s magazine cover. Life is messy. ©

Christmas Gift Shows and Mother Hens

Saturday I went to a Christmas gift show with three of my friends from the Gathering Girls. It was held at the gardens and sculpture park and I’ve been hearing about this show for years. It was huge and hiking in from where I had to park put over 2,000 steps on my Fitbit! It was shoulder-to-shoulder women inside and as I tried to keep track of my companions, I felt my mother-hen persona come out and my baby chicks were getting away. We’d already established at our designated meeting place that none of us had programmed each other’s contact information into our phones and I was mildly panicking that we’d get separated and never see each other again. What? It could happen! Someone with a fetish for mayhem and murder on his mind could have snatched one of us. Our nightly news has been filled with details of a trial going on of a guy who had done just that to a couple of women in town. He’s waiting sentencing now so we were probably safe at the Christmas gift show. That and the fact that none of us are young and cute anymore. Well, a couple of the Gathering Girls are cute but kidnappers usually don’t do ‘old.’ There are very few perks that come with having lots of birthdays, so we need to identify and celebrate them all. But I digress.

Alas, no one got lost although at one point I was seriously worried about one of the ladies. After lunch she and I went to the restroom but she didn’t come back for the longest time. She says she gets lost while driving and she would have gotten lost walking to the restroom if I had not been with her. I kicked myself for leaving her after my business was done. I did tell her I was going back to the restaurant, but what good would that have done if she had gotten lost in the 158 acres of the gardens and sculpture park? Guilt! Thou are my inner voice, my voice of shame. I beat myself up one side and down the other until she rejoined our table. 

Why when I’m hanging around with my posse of Gathering Girls do I feel an overwhelming urge to be the mother hen? They are all fully formed human adults not children or my post-stroke husband who needed my momma-hen persona to survive. I need to kill that ‘hen’ before I turn into a control freak! Why did I have to volunteer, for example, to stand in the long, snaking line to pay for purchases at the show as the others shopped the last few vendors? Was it kindness or was it a passive aggressive way of saying I was ready to leave? I asked that question of my inner voice but I received silence for an answer. Maybe Guilt developed laryngitis? Next stop on the Control Freak Train: Why did I have to volunteer to get our coats out of the coat room downstairs when the others took my place in that pay line? (I didn’t buy anything and I didn’t need to be there.) Was that kindness or controlling or was I being the mother hen again organizing her chicks? Please tell me it’s possible to be all three---a kindly old mother hen looking out for her flock. Doesn’t every group need one?

We had a good time but most of us agreed we’ll never go to a show that large and busy again. We expected more upscale, artsy-fartsy gifts and there were some but also plenty of plants, toys and specialty foods. We sampled chocolate covered everything but ants, drank tiny cups of coffee and I got a kick out of being tagged with a bright green bracelet proclaiming me to be “OVER 21” so I could sample the wines. When I got home I didn’t want to take that bracelet off. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone anywhere where the management couldn’t look at me and take a chance that, yes, she’s old enough to drink. That’s my spin but rules are rules and gray hair and wrinkles don’t count when free alcohol is involved. But seriously, do they really think someone would put on an old people mask and wig just to chug down a few ounces of wine? 

We had lunch in the park’s main building and it was spiced with our classic brand of easy and free conversation. We had planned to stop someplace else on the way back to our end of town and I jumped at seconding the suggestion that we stay there instead. I knew the walk back to the car would do me in. On future outings our newest member wants us to go to a few traffic congested places I avoid like walking barefoot on hot coals. If we do, she’d better take on the role of mother hen so I can be the chick who follows her out of my comfort zone…or into a tragic traffic accident resulting in several of us getting our driver’s licenses taken away. Oh, dear! There’s a law being introduced in our state congress that will require a driving test and a health review of any senior citizen involved in a fender bender. Double oh, dear if it passes! ©

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?

Answer: I don’t know, let the chicken mind its own business.

Nursing Homes and Barbie Dolls Nails

One of my sister-in-law’s had a series of falls a few weeks ago and had to be moved into a nursing home. She’d been living with her daughter who has a severe form of MS and is wheelchair bound which meant my niece-in-law also had to go into a nursing home. My sister-in-law is ten years older than me and for the past few years we’d often had the following conservation…

S-I-L:  “I’m ready to go to a nursing home where they take care of everything.”

Me: “You won’t like it. You have the best of two worlds right here.” They had home care aids coming in for six hours a day, 365 days a year who cooked, cleaned, did laundry, shopped and took care of medications and the daughter’s personal needs.

S-I-L: “It’s too much work to take care of the lawn and snow.”

Me: “What work? We both just call a service, sign a contract and write a check once or twice a year.”

Long story short ever since she’s been in the nursing home, she’s been insisting she wants to go back home which isn’t possible because her family emptied out her house and rented it within the first week, a decision not all the siblings were on board with but that’s not my story to tell. My sister-in-law is giving her family grief doing things like calling 911 because the aids don’t answer her call button fast enough, is discouraging her daughter from getting involved in activities and field trips at the home and is bad-mouthing the other residents.

This week I went with her other daughter to visit. Daughter number two goes twice a week to pick up and deliver laundry and iron out problems. The facility and rooms were nice but the (presumably underpaid) workers were sour-faced and it was depressing to think I could have been looking at my future. I don’t have daughters and sons to support me in a place like that…and it makes a real difference if you do. When my husband’s mother was in a nursing home for many years we went twice a week as well. It was a scavenger hunt each time. Where are her teeth, her glasses, her shoes? Check out Mable’s room first. (She was the resident kleptomaniac who squirreled things away in her closet.) Why is your mom wearing other people’s clothes? How did she get that nasty scratch on her arm?

One of my pet peeves about places like that is how they put red fingernail polish on people who can’t talk to object. I visited an aunt in Hospice Care once who was the next thing to a nun---a humble, simple person---and I was shocked to see someone had put red polish and lipstick on her. She never would have allowed that if she could have talked nor would my mother-in-law who was also painted up like a Barbie doll while in the nursing home. My sister-in-law, however, was happy with her blood-red polish.

Maybe I should write out a manifesto for if and when I go to a nursing home that could be posted on the back of the door next the codes about whether or not to give me the Heimlich Maneuver if I’m choking on a button I found on the floor. 1) No leaving me stark naked and exposed to anyone walking by in the hall while aids go on a coffee break. That actually happened to my husband in the month after his stroke---one of the reasons I brought him home. 2) No red nail polish. At least people who break the second rule can be forgiven because they’re trying to do something nice. People who break rule number one are heartless and border on criminally abusive. Nursing homes are scary places! Back in the late ‘80s two aids who worked at a local nursing home were convicted for killing five residences, the victims reportedly picked out to spell M-U-R-D-E-R with the initials of their first names. They would have gotten away with the murders, too, if an x-husband hadn’t ratted them out.

I should (but probably won’t) visit my sister-in-law on a regular basis like I did when she lived near-by which was a couple of times a month. I’ve always had the ability to say things to her that her kids couldn’t, things to help smooth her ruffled feathers when she gets to complaining too much. She calls me Mother Theresa because, she says, I always know the right things to say and do. I don't agree, but I do know that between my husband’s mother, my dad and my husband I’ve done my time in the ‘healthcare system.’ I want to be selfish, not selfless with the time I have left. Does that make me a bad person when I see an opportunity to help and I don’t want to act on it? Will Karma get me if I don’t? I hope not. At least not today. I’m going to the first meeting of a newly forming book club and I’m happy about that. ©