Primary-Free Diary: Old Wounds

The hardest thing about living with an elderly parent is that there are always unresolved issues that need to be worked out.  In my case, I have to get Dad to understand that I am an adult and deserve to be treated  with respect, not ordered around like a twelve year old. This has become a priority, since we’ll be moving into a house together and out of my MiL’s home. This means MiL is no longer interfering, which is good—but it also means we can’t use MiL to convince him of stuff (if I ask him something, he’ll automatically refuse; if she asks him, he does it). Dad’s developed a tendency to ignore any suggestions I make or, if he deigns to listen to them, automatically refuse.

This trend has been surfacing since he decided to take the home equity loan and buy the 4 bedroom house (great lay-our: two bedrooms at each end, separated by the common areas, so lots of privacy) he fell in love with.  The house is painted a neutral pale taupe. Problem is that creamy taupe turns to an ugly, depressing deeper shade once the sun no longer brightens a room.  I am very sensitive to color (Dad can’t tell one dark shade from another—brown, burgundy, navy blue look the same to him).  Because the roof has an overhang to  help cool the place, it darkens pretty quickly, and needs to be brightened. My choice was to repaint the LR and our hallway (Dad likes the taupe so he’ll keep it in his hallway and rooms) a white that has an undertone of blush. It’s a color I’ve used twice before in similar rooms, and it brightens up the area and warms it. It will go nicely with the pinky taupe marble of the fireplace 9for a low-end house, this has lots of lovely touches) and floor to ceiling white built-in bookcases.  It also goes with the burgundy and white and Navy color scheme of my furniture (Mom’s couch and chairs will eventually be covered with burgundy slipcovers, and my couch is white).  

Dad threw a fit about it being too pink.  Mind you, he admits he has no color sense and knows nothing about decorating a house because Mom did that (typical WW II marriage).  The one time he insisted on his way with furniture, everyone except him hated it. He chose Ethan Allen colonial with the wooden wings, and the couch and chair were done in brown and olive with a pattern that featured Revolutionary War men with muskets.  It looked like John Wayne meets the battle of Bunker Hill. Mom endured it for a few years, then banished it to the den and bought new, less clunky stuff. Dad’s taste, is to put it mildly, pretty awful.  HE finally came around when my husband convinced him that if he hates it, we’ll repaint it in plain ivory. Funny thing is, when I painted a LR like this the first time, he was amazed by how good it looked. These days, that  memory has been revised—Dad’s memory loss is often very convenient and usually is made up of memories he’d rather not remember.

It’s not the paint color that’s the problem here. It’s what the incident signifies. Dad still behaves as if he can arbitrarily  make all decisions without any input or consideration for me.  Which, frankly, is what he’s always done. It’s partly my fault and Mom’s.  When he’d unilaterally nix something, all too often we’d simply do it without telling him, and 9 times out 10, he never noticed it because it wasn’t important to him (which makes you wonder why he’d be so dead-set against it in the first place).  Since I was a kid at the time, I never recognized it for what it really was: passive aggression at its worst.   When I did, I made a promise to myself that I’ve kept: I prefer to confront my spouse on an issue and hash it out, even if it means an unpleasant argument, rather than sneaking around.  Dad is finding this hard to deal with, especially since his natural tendency to is refuse any request or suggestion I make.

The classic example came when we discussed how to handle moving his stuff up. MiL is a morning person, and wanted to leave the house at 5:30 a.m.  I do not do 5 in the morning.  Plus you’d hit Atlanta rush hour traffic which means you’d sit forever inching along  when you could have missed it by leaving at 9. I tried to make this point. MiL and Dad just talked over me as if I weren’t saying anything or wasn’t even present. It took my husband saying very loudly, "Excuse me," to get their attention.  Even then, they acted like I hadn’t spoken

I felt like  a three=year old girl I had observed on a Disneyworld visit. She and her extended family were getting organized at a table in a restaurant.  She wanted to sit next to her grandfather. She said this in a clearly audible  but polite tone three times. Everyone ignored her.   Finally, she climbed on a chair and said quite noisily, "I wanna sit next to Grandpa." At that point, her mortified mother moved the booster seat next to his. The child sat down, her needs met, and behaved delightfully during the entire lunch. Sometimes I feel like I have to metaphorically stand on a table to get heard, to make Dad recognize that I am a grown-up too, not a child whose job is to go along with her parent’s wishes. Setting boundaries is extremely important at this time.

This is part of the joy and frustration of spending time with an elderly parent.  Often, roles were fixed in childhood, and were never re-negotiated as an adult. I suspect that because I’ve spent most of my  married life not living in the same area and because I never had children, he still sees me as a kid.  If we’d had kids, he might  have recognized me as a parent, and thus an adult and an equal.

And sometimes that can be hilarious.  One of the things Ben and I were concerned about when we became his caretakers and companions was that we have some privacy.  Having a bedroom isn’t really enough. At MiL’s, our bedroom backs up to hers, so we have to be very quiet  all the time. I don’t want to put on an auditory sex show.  I tried to convey the need for some separation fo the rooms—basically two suites of rooms with the common area between us or our rooms on a second level—to Dad gently.

Dad asked, "You’re 58 years old. What the hell do you need privacy for?"

I looked him square in the eye, and stopped beating about the bush. "Dad, I may be 58, but we still make love. And sometimes I make noise louder than a whisper.  I’d be very uncomfortable with you overhearing us, and so would you."

He has never raised that issue again. It’s the first time Dad’s being a prude came in handy.

But there we are.  I will be making a lot of changes in the next few weeks.  Dad and Ben closed on the house this morning and are en route to FL with MiL  to finish the minimal packing (all Mom’s kitchen stuff was donated to charity), load the truck, and convey his stuff to the new house. I am here to feed the cats, do laundry and pack up our china cabinets and books (mostly done, already) so we can convey that over to the new house.  Next week we’ll paint our master bedroom and bathroom in shades of dusty rose, and the dining room in a deep cherry red. Then we’ll try to get things arranged so we can sleep there next weekend, and unpack everything. We’re still arranging for water, cable and phones and internet to be turned on.  I’ll have access here at home, but until the cable company gets to us, I won’t have anything on site.  

I’ll be absent for the next few weeks while we get the mess straightened out. And then the fun of training Dad to unlearn 58 years of bossing me around begins.  The Packhorse had to withdraw from his clinicals, to start over in the fall semester, so I’ll have some moral support and backing in the endeavor.  MiL won’t be underfoot to enable him in bad behavior (if I say that I won’t do exactly what he wants at he exact second he wants it done—and like many elderly people, he gets obsessed with things and thinks I should drop everything to do what he wants, even if I am in the middle of doing dinner or taking a  shower—he tattles to her about "mean" I was not to immediately fulfill his whim of the moment), and we can start relating as adults who share a living space, rather than Cinderella and her elderly father. And maybe he’ll get to know me, and actually like the woman I have grown into.

So, TTFN, and I’ll be back with diaries about abortion and domestic violence later.