Tag Archives: acceptance

Being in Charge of Everything is a Tough Job

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man holding a megaphone

I like control. 

I like that sense that I have the ability to change things to suit my desires. 

I just wish it were true.

Putting Feet on the Ground

Once over the initial shock of confronting a caregiving crisis, the cocky youngster in me decided that this should be easy to whip. Such hubris demands a solid response from the world, and the world did not disappoint in my case.

After a number of knockdowns, the idea that I was not really in charge began to dawn. 

I am not sure where in my upbringing this arrogance was instilled, but Real World experiences excel in providing me reasons and opportunities to reassess my assumptions.

Caregiving As Teacher

As I interact and observe behaviors in society these days, I am struck by the emotional flailing of individuals and groups trying to assert that they alone are the authority. 

It all starts to sound familiar.

Asserting demands is one thing. Actually having those demands met in the fashion you want is entirely different.

As I learned figuratively picking myself up for the umpteenth time when caring for others, recognizing when and what we control is important. Recognizing when we do not is even more important.

Being humbled is still a part of the human experience.

You can certainly loudly make your demands, stamp your feet, and refuse to move until you get what you want.

You may actually get something for your efforts, but there will be a price. Life is transactional in that to get something, you must give something.

Not everyone likes what they have to give in the transaction.

Choosing Peace

two person holding white and green peace wreath
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The humility I developed over the course of caregiving experiences, focuses on reducing frustration and anxiety caused by trying to push that proverbial round peg through the square hole.

You have to wonder when life keeps serving up the same frustrating lesson to you that maybe you need to look at yourself as the cause. Just because you want to make the problem “out there” does not make it so.

Choosing acceptance, and learning to be grateful for what you have, are sometimes tough lessons.

Troubled Spirits

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Partly from being on the receiving end of some impassioned, though misguided, enmity lately, and partly from watching people and their respective decline in compassion for one another, I see the troubled times in which we live.

As a child, I grew up in the turbulent 1960’s and saw similarly difficult times. I also saw the world slowly regain its composure and sanity. 

I have hope that we will do that again.

Restoring balance, that peace of mind and spirit, starts on an individual level. We get to be that agent of change by embracing the opportunity that our life experience is presenting to us.

Finding that all of the frustration we have been feeling has come from learning that we are not in charge of everything after all.

A tough lesson but life is full of them. Time to get a grip.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

When the Best You Can Do Is the Best You Can Do

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Caregivers come in all varieties. Industry managers to homebodies, we are a very diverse group. I like to think that this is due to common natural aging processes that prompt a need for care. Old age and infirmity do not discriminate.

One of our common traits is our dedication to tasks at hand. Yes, we despair at times and need some help for ourselves, but we regularly get back up on that horse and return to our avocation. 

We persevere.

Reality Bites

woman in gray tank top looking furious
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A common human experience is frustration with the way things are and the way we would like them to be. Similar to many political discussions these days, learning to work the problems and devise attainable solutions is much more useful than standing in the middle of the floor and crying about how we are not getting our way in life.

Growing up can be tough at times, but as we mature (hopefully), we find acceptance of reality to be a feature of being human. We aspire to greater accomplishments, yet accept that our dreams and plans are not always supported.

Being a grownup is tough.

Compromise Sounds Like

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Accepting circumstances as they are is a superpower. Being able to unplug from the cascading emotions brought on by frustration is empowering. I highly recommend the practice.

Being a calm eye of the storm can, however, be misinterpreted as apathy to the untrained eye. 

There are still times when I feel like I am leaving a situation only half completed. Some of this guilt I think comes from the high expectations I have for myself. I should not be the one falling apart. I should be the one making the sensible decisions, I should, I should…

The lesson eventually learned is that with most caregiving situations, there is not a resounding success but a whimpering compromise that resolves the situation. Our high personal standards take the hit, but the reality is that our best effort is going to have to be enough.

Not defeat but a nod to our adversary, truth. The truth of our situation wins on its own terms, always. We will have the occasional success (Dad actually handed over his car keys without a fight!), but we manage the rest of the defeats with style and humility.

Being Our Best

black and white dartboard
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As warriors in these conflicts, I think we often struggle with ourselves as much as our caregiving situations. 

We must.

We have to be strong for others. Since the path to those strengths is not clearly defined, we blaze a trail that is unique to us and our situation.

Cutting ourselves some slack as we meet these challenges becomes essential. When we have done all we can with the tools and resources available to us, it is enough.

Forgive. It is the best that we can do.

“Believe in yourself. You are braver than you think, more talented than you know, and capable of more than you imagine.”
― Roy T. Bennett

A Gift of Caregiving

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In case you have not tried it, writing about caregiving experiences can be very therapeutic. Whether viewing events in life’s rear-view mirror or swimming chest deep in the caregiving experience, writing lays out a lot of the details for the writer to reflect upon.

You will discover some especially cool “a-ha’s” along the way that teach some wonderful lessons that we can learn in no other way. Reflectively looking at events and emotions can provide much needed perspective. You will likely surprise yourself.

girl frustration caregiving

Frustration 101

I think that most of us can agree, frustration is one of the most common emotions in caregiving. Frustration with the poor decision-making of our loved ones, frustration with the bureaucracies we engage, and especially frustrations with the critical evaluation of our own actions (i.e., I sure could have done THAT better).

The difference is in how we choose to respond to these frustrations. Such choices are unique to each of us.

We all know that person who finds fault and problems with every situation. Ever feel like you are becoming that person?

Even when we occasionally channel that sort of personality (we all have our moments), why aren’t we always that way ?

I like to think of it as the frustration effect. We share the experience of repeated frustration – one annoying situation after another. Getting angry is the normal reaction and works for the first few occurrences. After a while, however, we start to see that anger doesn’t solve problems. We just end up angry and the situation is unchanged.

As we used to say years ago, “Well duh?”

We hit that fork in the road where we can choose to respond like a child and be angry or we can be courageous and try something different. Letting go of anger is the single best thing we can do and is by far the hardest thing to do. Growing up is not for sissies.

growing up teddy bear

Liberation

Letting go sure gets things done. Letting go takes us places.

When preparing to move Dad into Assisted Living, I ran into that wondrous growth opportunity of transition from the dependent son role to being a parent to my parent.

My struggle with this transition was surprisingly difficult. I didn’t want to leave. I still wanted to be the little boy and be cared for. Stepping out of this dependent character and moving into a character of responsibility, knowing intuitively that there was no going back, was one of those landmark moments in life.

In the same definitive ways that family members respond to the incapacity of loved ones (either they step up or they don’t – there is no in-between), this personal choice is all in or not at all. No negotiated half measures. It just is what it is.

Alternatives

I worked in Social Services many years ago. Tough job. I worked alongside some truly wonderful and courageous people who had been warped by the negativity of a dysfunctional system. They had stayed too long.

Circumstances can change participants in constructive and destructive ways. Even in caregiving, we have some tough choices to make. Resenting having to make the choices does not help. The anger just binds us tighter.

Denial is powerful. Hope springs eternal that there is some magical workaround that will fix things to our liking. Problem is that there really are no cheats available. The Kobayashi Maru only exists in fiction. Reality just offers consequences.

juggler

The Hard and the Soft of the Matter

We certainly develop tough shells as caregivers. We must. We make tough decisions and work tough situations every day.

The difference is that we balance this toughness with a deep abiding love for the people we care for. We take the lies, evasions, and often poor decision-making of the ones in our care and put all those issues aside, like any good parent would do.

We are powerful in the knowledge that having chosen the harder road, acceptance instead of anger, we provide the highest quality care. Because when the end comes, and it does come, we finish knowing that it was a good day. We had done our best.

Never underestimate this knowledge of yourself.

Your choices and actions were never wasted. You made a difference.

“I’m not… I’m not without a heart,’ he heard Sophia say, her chin raised, eyes straight ahead. ‘I’m not. I just don’t have the luxury of being soft. I am trying to survive.”
― Alexandra Bracken

When Death Smiled and I Smiled Back

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a walkway inside the cemetery

In a caregiving relationship, there is more to the story than just helping another person with their problems. There is an intimacy between people that comes with this sort of relationship and there is something more. There is that ominous something else in the room. Something only glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Something that feels like the proverbial elephant in the room that bears down on conversation but no one wishes to acknowledge.

There is always death.

There, I said it.

Death makes us squirm. That end-of-life certainty that everyone avoids. Death is far more noticeable when helping someone as they progress through their final journey. It was probably there all the time. We just tumbled to the fact under these unusual circumstances.

Funny thing, though. As the loved one approaches their demise, death becomes a much more familiar entity. It is always underfoot but not obtrusive. Death becomes almost friendly.

woman with white hair and black paint on face
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Don’t Be Morbid

As we have seen in society in recent years, the intrusiveness of death can really put the whammy on some people’s behavior. Fear does funny things to people.

From officials of society, education and business doing a really good Chicken Little imitation, to a broader incivility problem among the public, the presence of a disease that has a solid track record of killing people (COVID-19) just made things real. Fear on a world wide scale.

Our views on death and the dying process are as varied as we are as people. Religion obviously has a profound effect as funerals and burials are a regular part of religious practice.

As a preacher’s kid, I was around a lot of older individuals in the church. They had a habit of dying naturally over the years, prompting the need to attend ceremonies that are ostensibly designed to send off the dead but in reality are only for the living. All that ritual and flowery language failed to inform me.

woman s face
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Close but Not Quite

As a teen, when people who were close to me began to die, I responded in a fashion like what we have seen in society in recent years. I just lost it.

Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had it right. The first response to grief is denial. I could find no reason to connect the death of a friend with any sense of normalcy or natural process. (Besides, as a teenager, I was going to beat the odds and live forever.)

It is from these experiences of adolescence that I recognize so much of the weird behavior around us today. Having once gone crazy over death, I know that neighborhood. Am I ever glad I moved out.

two men inside moving vehicle
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Death Upon Arrival

With the start of my caregiver adventures, I was older and felt a difference that I ascribed to finally being more of a grown-up. I made sure to distract myself with the business affairs at hand. As I had done as a grad student, I just kept my head down and feet moving.

Eventually I had to pause to catch my breath and I realized things had changed. I had changed. Dad and his situation had not changed but I was finally seeing a something that I had spent loads of energy and years trying to ignore.

This was not something I had sought out but there it was, staring me in the face. It felt like those dreams or movie scenes where you see the charging demon descending upon you. You close you eyes to wait for the inevitable contact – but it doesn’t come. When you open your eyes, the vicious creature that you thought was going to devour you is calmly sitting next to you on the sofa.

That was my adult introduction to death.

I recognized death for the first time and blinked. When I opened my eyes and my heart to the experience, I began to understand the world and my self without the menace we place on our view of a final passing.

The truth, well my truth, is that I am developing an understanding of death. I have seen it in others, and I have found a connection to it in me. Don’t get me wrong – I have absolutely no interest in becoming more intimately acquainted with dying in the immediate future, but I have a fundamental understanding what I will someday be up against.

You too.

Death is that quiet passenger in the back seat of the car. Full of potential changes but choosing to quietly go along as I journey through my life. The uncertainty of what lies beyond will always be there but having seen others make the transition with this same passenger in tow (and the peace and acceptance that many of them demonstrated at the end), I may be arriving in Dr. Kubler-Ross’ final stage of Acceptance.

I like to think so, anyway.

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change”
― Isabel Allende

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