This is a scarily relevant question for me. For the past year, I could be the poster child for helping behavior. Maybe not the kind of helping that the prompt is hoping to elicit, which I imagine to be the mentoring/working in a soup kitchen type of helping, but helping nonetheless.
I moved my 88-year-old blind and hard-of-hearing mother from her own home in Florida to a senior retirement center in Macon in June of 2010. Let me preface this by saying that I love my mom dearly, but we’ve never been extremely close or compatible and I do admit to some trepidation as to how this move would impact my life. I calmed those fears with images of my mother making new friends her own age, swapping life stories, knocking on each other’s doors for afternoon tea. And as she increased her social interaction, I pictured myself gracefully bowing out, dropping by once or twice a week to visit, pay her bills, take her grocery shopping.
Unfortunately, those visions haven’t come to fruition and I still find myself stopping at her apartment every day after work. The social interaction, with the exception of her lunch hour in the dining room, is non-existent. As I arrive on pretty days, I see many of the elderly ladies sitting outside, chatting and laughing. But my mother is alone in her apartment, listening to her talking books. She’s never been an outdoor person—too hot, too cold, too windy, too buggy—you get the picture. (Am I really her daughter?) The fact that she can’t see and has fallen twice also plays a big role in her reluctance to venture out. She’s very dependent on my visits, requesting that I call her if I can’t stop, which deters me from calling because I then have to come up with a viable “reason.”
I never know how long I’ll be there or what I’ll find when I stop. One day she had accidentally dumped an entire new box of detergent between her washer and dryer, which reside in a hallway closet. I wrestled the machines out of the closet, cleaned up the soap, and wrestled them back in again. Another day, deciding to rearrange things, she had emptied her entire clothes closet on her bed, forgetting that she couldn’t see to match up the pants and blouses again. I’m Ms. Fix-It for any broken items (or items that she thinks are broken due to operator error). I’ve learned to interpret the numerous financial statements she receives for her complicated system of stocks and bonds, and I often repeat those figures over and over again to an 88-year-old mind that now hopelessly scrambles numbers.
She imparts a sense of urgency to all awaiting tasks. One afternoon, when I got up to leave after an extended visit, she said, “Oh, I wanted you to sew this button on my blouse.” My heart sinking and my stomach growling for dinner, I asked, “How about if I do that tomorrow?” She hesitated. “Well… I was hoping you could do it today.” So I caved, all the while thinking of her closet full of clothes and wondering why, in her mind, this blouse had to be repaired NOW.
My mother has always enjoyed telling stories, repeating her favorite tales over and over again whether the listener has heard them before or not. Aging has exacerbated that quality, and her forgetfulness causes her to change the details or even switch the people involved. I listen without correcting or interrupting, even when the story is sometimes repeated twice or (God help me) three times in the same conversation.
So before you nominate me for sainthood, let me just say that my helping behavior produces a veritable cornucopia of feelings and emotions, and they aren’t all pretty. I’m often struggling to keep the impatience out of my voice. I’m fighting the resentment over the loss of “me” time, and then feeling guilty and selfish over that very resentment. And all the while, I’m sad to see her confusion and helplessness, worried over whether she’s really happy—and wondering what I’ll be like in MY old age.
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