Posted inmarriage

Anger has its price

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Angry guyI’ve been nagging my husband about his temper since we had kids. Come to think of it, he really didn’t lose his temper until we had kids. Hmm. He yells at them, then I get on him for yelling, and he tells me that they gave him an excuse to yell. We’ve been doing this dance for some time now, and I could never convince him that his anger had a price. Until now.

We were leaving Target, and my two-and-a-half-year-old son had followed my daughter and me into the ladies’ room. When we came out, he headed to our special two-seater cart  and tried to climb onto it. Not wanting to take the cart to the car, my husband grabbed the bags out of it and said, “You grab him.” I did, he held fast to the cart and he started to cry. Wail. Scream. I held him across my body like a sash while he kicked and screamed, all the way to the parking garage. read more


Posted inSeniors

With Dad, nothing comes easy

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old_man-2It seems so unreal. My father is dead. There’ll be no more Dad, ever.  Ever.

On our first day back East, we went to the funeral home to make arrangements. The funeral was the next day but apparently you can wait until the last minute to go over the details. So we did. One of our tasks was to get Dad clothes to wear in the casket. After our meeting, we headed straight to his house to pick up a suit.

We had two keys. They were marked “Upper front door,” and “Lower front door” in masking tape. I watched the kids in the driveway. My husband tried “Upper front door.” Jiggled it. No luck. He tried “Lower front door.” Jiggled it. No luck. read more


Posted inEmotional Intelligence

Late post

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I’m so sorry I didn’t post on Sunday. I am not living my real life right now — getting things settled with my Dad’s estate — so it’s hard for me to get time to work on a post. After I finish this note, I’ll start to write my next post. At the latest, I will post it on Sunday. Thanks for your patience and please keep coming back. If you’re new, check out some old posts. I hope you enjoy them.

Maria


Posted inSeniors

Dad’s latest surprise: Checking out

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old_man-2The last we heard from my dad, he was in rehab for his leg, trying desperately to escape. The nurse called me three days after he’d checked in to tell me that he fell, sort of. She said he didn’t exactly fall, but he ended up on his knees next to his bed. “He’s been trying to escape since he got here,” she said. She explained that he’d tried to fly the coop so much that they’d put two tracking devices on him. One device went off if he got out of bed by himself and the other sounded an alarm if he got close to an exit. So basically my 84-year-old dad was on house arrest in this nursing home, making several attempts a day to escape.

He’d checked himself out of his last rehab before he could walk. I asked the nurse if he could sign out in his current partially demented state and she assured me that he couldn’t, so basically they had the right to restrain him. Good. It didn’t matter to him that the last time he’d escaped, he was crawling around his house, hardly eating or drinking, probably because he couldn’t reach much from the floor. (See “Dad’s latest accident — Fourth in a series: “There’s no place like home:) It didn’t matter that his visiting nurse had called an ambulance when she found him like that. He’d refused to go to the hospital. Once he’d gotten his full-time aide and recovered a little, he told me, “I may have messed myself up checking out before I could walk.” No duh?? read more


Posted inEmotional Intelligence

Lessons from the house next door

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Today I say goodbye to an old friend. Not my dad – he’s still in rehab and that’s another story. Today I say goodbye to Tim*, my BFF Beth’s dad. He died suddenly last week, leaving Beth devastated. I’m in shock too. Tim was like an uncle to me. Beth’s family moved in next door to heart of goldmine when I was nine years old. Beth and I had a picnic in the lush grass above the septic tank on moving day and we’ve been friends ever since.

Beth’s dad always had a kind word and a smile for us, and everyone, for that matter. He taught Beth and me to play badminton with the net they’d erected in the backyard. I remember him wielding the racket, saying, “Hit’ll up, Beth! Hit’ll up, Maria!” as we ran up and down the sloped backyard after the birdie. read more