Nearby is the country they call ✨real✨ life!
On being in reality even when it sucks.
Yesterday, while talking about all the various things causing us (me) to feel overwhelmed, Colin said “it’s real life” in the way that someone might say “it is what it is,” and I was comforted by it.
Real life has been a mess lately, but it IS real. And I guess living in reality is good?
Last week, my dad fell in the night, and couldn’t get himself up. We didn’t find him until morning. He was thankfully not physically injured, but we were all pretty shaken up by it. We live in the same house, and still, this happened. It’s painful (unimaginable!) to think about him spending hours on the floor while we slept just two stories above.
He’s been recovering well, but the incident brought a lot of questions to the fore that didn’t seem urgent a week ago, and now seem inevitable and obvious and at least urgent-ish.
Questions about how his care needs will change (and increase) in the days, weeks, months to come. About which medical alert services are best, and how to ensure he can sound an in-house alarm when we’re home but too far to hear him slip. About how it will be possible for us to ever go out of town again, without having some sort of live-in carer take our places temporarily. About whether it’ll be advisable for him to drive for much longer, and how we’ll manage his shopping and cooking and chores, when we’re already falling apart at the seams with our own household duties and jobs and homeschooling (and yeah, my MA).
My dad is nearly 88 years old, and while he’s remarkably independent for his age, he has been slowing down. It’s the unavoidable slowdown that happens to anyone lucky enough to grow old. It can’t be cured or helped. It’s real life!
I’m not ready for this reality. I’ve been putting off thinking about my dad going through any kind of health crisis or aging-related decline ever since my mom died, because I not-so-secretly suspect I might not survive another round of the kind of real life I had to endure in 2020. I limped along for a while after that horrible year, but ultimately had a full-assed breakdown, had to quit my job and spent (conservatively) 18 months trying to get the feeling back in my fingers and toes.
Of course, that situation was exacerbated by the pandemic, which was very fresh. But the demands of parenting now (an almost-ten-year-old) are so much greater than the demands of parenting then (a four-year-old), that I think stress-level-wise, it comes out even.
Plus, we’re a man down. In 2020, my dad was a big help. Colin kept our household afloat and did 90% of the parenting, while I worked and cared for my mom nearly around-the-clock, but my dad still did a lot of shopping, cooking, cleaning, errands. Who’s gonna do it all now? Me?
My dad’s feeling a lot better, but I don’t know if we’ll ever get our pre-fall lives back, and I feel totally unprepared for whatever comes next. All this ‘sandwich generation’1 stuff can, in the words of Dipshit Derek from Stranger Things, suck my fat one. I’ve been so overwhelmed that I haven’t even had time to write a Substack about the joy of marathoning Stranger Things with my kid, and the heartbreak of realizing that the startling growth spurts those kids go through season-to-season are just a few years away from happening to him! I am not ready for that reality either.
I guess I have to get ready for all of it.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.2
I haven’t read it yet, but I hear that Sandwich, by Catherine Newman, is a wonderful novel about the particular midlife horror of being stuck in the middle of two generations that need a lot from us.
A snippet from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Go to the Limits of Your Longing, the pretty-much-perfect poem you might know because a different line from it was made famous(ish) by the film Jojo Rabbit. Of course, it was my father who got me into Rilke, some 30 years ago. This poem’s an all-timer for me, it never fails to hit me like a truck.