210 Creative

“When I go to bed every night, I think about the fact that tomorrow will be worse than today.”

Let me qualify.  We all have control issues.  I live in a little glass house and my hands are filled with stones.  That said, my dad has always been in control.  In fact, there have only been two times in my 42 years when I saw him lose control.  Once, when an old car squealed and raced through our little street when we were little kids and out playing.  We were in the street when we shouldn’t have been, but the car was going way to fast.  He yelled, screamed, ran out into the street and kicked the side of the car as it raced by.  He always hit his mark.  The second time?  Every time I close my eyes and think of him trying to deal with my sister when she was a kid.  More on that later.

For over 70 years, most every element of my dad’s life seemed to unfold as he planned or according to his wishes.  Ever forward.  As a lad in the little town of La Veta, Colorado, he was a star on the basketball court and excelled in school, achieving a position of distinction being THE top 12 percent of his graduating class (there were only 8 kids in the class).  He was the BMOC and ran through the little town with impunity, being the middle child of the grocery store owner, a notable person himself in this town of barely 400.  He will tell you it was tough.  After all, he had to walk to school in ten feet of snow.  Up hill.  Both ways.  Of course, the distance from his house to the school was only about 2 blocks, but we gave him his jokes and laughed…every time he told it.

When he got a little older, he attended college in Colorado and then graduate school in Oklahoma.  He married his sweetheart, a beauty pageant runner up from the farm lands of Kansas.  She was gorgeous, of course.  Her parents had a cabin in the mountains near that little mountain town and they had met and fallen in love every summer around the grocery store.  He got his masters degree (a designation that was a bit more rare back in the 1960’s than it is today) and then his CPA.  They had their first child, my sister, and he was hired by one of the most notable accounting and consulting firms in the country.  Next stop, New York.  They were on their way.

Yeah, there were setbacks, of sorts.  His bride and recent mother of their first child wanted to be closer to home, so they left the Big Apple for small town Kansas.  Not exactly a hot bed of financial and professional success, but he made the best of it, seeking and accepting jobs of note that built his resume as well as his family worth.  They bought houses and he worked hard.  Long hours.  They had their second child, the most attractive and brilliant little boy one could imagine.  Life kept moving.  He provided.

This is where things seemed to start changing.  Although my dad always seemed to have an uncanny grasp on life in the business world, people were another matter.  He could always manage situations.  He was, and still is, the one who always said and did what was right and what the rest of us only wish we could.  However, it seemed that as his fortunes grew, both personally and professionally, his control over his interpersonal relationships started to slip.

Although control over other people has always been an issue for all people, for the purposes of this story, and from the limited memories of yours truly, let’s say it started with some standard disobedience from his first born.  They would fight and claw.  She would do something stupid and he would discipline.  She would push and he would push back.  There were moments of chases, screams and power plays, actions and reactions for years mixed in with the other moments of standard family bliss and walks to Dairy Queen.  Yeah, she would steal the car and get drunk…when she was 13.  Yeah, she would date guys that were unacceptable, yet were diamonds in the rough from her perspective.  Yeah, she would blatantly lie and willfully under perform in school even though she was always extremely bright and capable.  And, yeah, he would punish her, grounding her for 25 years, sending her to her room and taking away her phone privileges, TV privileges, breathing privileges and anything else he and his wife could think to take away.  She was a constant challenge (and occassionally continues to be well into her 40’s).  He would try to control.

Over the next decade or two, personal issues continued as his professional career kept progressing nicely.  Each new job brought more money, higher status, better houses and cars, more power, a couple location changes and, apparently, growing resentment from members of his most inner circle.  After 25 years of marriage, citing emotional neglect and more, his wife decided to move on.  He was alerted to this by finding their house empty upon returning from a business trip.  His kids were away at college, so he was left alone to pick up the pieces and figure out just what went wrong.  Of course he had to regain control and start this journey from a hotel room as his wife had taken their bed. It seemed he could hire and fire people and he could build businesses and fix what was broken with organizations.  He was brilliant and calculating, but he couldn’t control the personal as he had the professional.  Who can?

Time heals all wounds, or so the story goes.  The divorce was final, after some pain and suffering from both parties.  There were some victories on both sides.  There were some defeats on both sides.  There was a struggle for control.  And, yes, sides were taken.  The co-dependant love/hate relationship between he and his 22 year old daughter brought her to be his champion.  The son?  Well, he was trying to emotionally separate himself from the situation as much as possible, attempting to establish his own independence and personal autonomy.  He was absent.  With the benefit of hindsight, he wishes he was a bit more of a mature nineteen to see that episode as an opportunity to love and support all sides of his family unconditionally…but that is another story.

A couple years passed.  Scars faded.  Control was regained and love was found again, this time in the form of a spunky divorced single mother of three little ones and, considering his less than passionate desire to manage children, their relationship grew.  They were married a few years later and success followed, as it had before.  She got into real estate, and flourished wildly.  He got another great and powerful job with a great and powerful company.  CFO.  COO.  CEO.  C-Who the Hell Knows.  They made it big over the next 15 years, bought big houses, nice cars, condos in Scottsdale and started planning for a future of peace and relative luxury, once those freaking kids of hers went away (my statement, not his).  And they did go away…kind of. But that, too, is another story.

Finally, retirement.  Of course, my dad never retires.  He controls what he can.  He consults.  He manages money and business ventures for others, and himself.  He sits on boards.  But, he was in complete control of when he worked and where.  That’s not a bad way to do it, if you ask me.  He was 65 and tired.  She was 55 and wound up and ready to go.  Life was finally, and in most respects, under his control.  They traveled all over the world.  They sat and had martinis and fantastic dinners in every nice restaurant they could find.  Their kids and their friends visited when time allowed.  They played golf and sat by the pool.  They read, went to movies and watched Fox News.  They relaxed.  A lifetime of control issues faded away.  Finally, he could let go.

After two years of intense study and countless appointments with doctors, my dad’s wife was diagnosed with a very early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease.  She was 59.  Her memory had started to fail her a couple years back.  It was no big deal at first.  Little things.  Headaches.  But it got worse.  Soon it was troubling.  She would wake up and not know if she took her medications, what day it was, or even where she was.  She would lose track of her purse and her phone and her glasses in the house or at the pool.  She would try to cook or bake and follow recipes only to be met with culinary disaster as she would add the eggs or the baking powder 4 times because she would forget that she added them 30 seconds before.  She would forget that she put something in the oven for a few hours and make an unbelievable mess in the kitchen.  She would clean the mess and mop the floors…four times because she forgot that she did it 5 minutes ago.  Cooking had to stop.  Even making lists wouldn’t help as she ended up making multiple ones after forgetting the first ones existed.

After a while, she started to limit her conversations to only subjects she could remember.  So, they would talk about the same 7 things over and over and over again so that she would feel comfortable and not forgetful.  Every day.  It’s okay.  She didn’t remember she had talked about it at all.  But he did.  They would watch the same movie a few times.  It’s okay.  She didn’t remember seeing it the day before.  But he did.  She started to focus on what she could still do.  Clean the house.  Laundry, although she would forget what she washed 30 minutes before and wash it all again.  She would read care instructions then ruin clothing because she didn’t remember how it was to be washed.  She cried because she ruined his sweater.  It’s okay.  It’s just a damn sweater.  He didn’t care about the sweater.  She was losing control.

Now, he has to try to control what cannot be controlled.  He makes sure she takes her pills and gets to her nail appointment and her hair appointment, and remembers if it’s cut time, cut and highlight time, or cut and color time.  He has to control what they do and where they go.  What they eat, what flavor of ice cream she likes and what they drink.  Too much to drink and she loses control.  Alcohol effects the brain.  Too much activity shuts her down.  Her brain, struggling with trying simply to find a thought before it disappears, just can’t handle too much stimulus.  She forgets what she was wanting to mention and she struggles to regain control of her thoughts.  Her heart races with stress.  She sleeps.  “Maybe tomorrow will be better,” was a statement that was used for a couple years.  It’s not anymore.

They fight.  He needs help but she won’t believe she is that bad and so in need of even the most simple of care.  She screams at him.  She forgets.  He doesn’t.  He feels alone and utterly out of control.  She needs him and loves him.  She is lost without him.

Every day, he gets up hoping for a good day.  And some days are okay.  Some days aren’t.  Some days they take long walks, although those days really tire her out and force her to nap the rest of the day.  Some days they enjoy pancakes and coffee at their favorite little breakfast cafe even though she has trouble remembering what she likes.  “Just surprise me,” she says as he heads to to the counter to place the order.  Some days they laugh on the patio of their favorite restaurant while the wait staff  and bar staff take care of their every need.  Some days, nothing happens.  Some days are okay.  Some days aren’t.  He used to hope for better days.  Now, he just hopes for days that aren’t bad and, every once in a while when he feels himself losing a bit of control, he says things that make me feel the days of hoping are fading.

“When I go to bed every night, I think about the fact that tomorrow will be worse than today.”

On Valentine’s day, they are going to sit on the patio of that favorite restaurant, have the wait staff and bar staff attend to their every need, have a good dinner at their favorite table and go to bed and relax, hopefully thinking about what a great day it was and how tomorrow may just be better.

Tags: family, Health, Life, Love, Personal, Relationships, valentine's day, Writing