I’m hiring a
housekeeper, something I said I would never do again. It’s unlikely there’s anyone out there that could
live up to my standards. I’m the only
one that will get every crumb from under the kitchen table, every smudge from
the refrigerator door, and every single germ off the bathroom floor. I was tutored by the best—my mother, the Cleaning
General. She taught me to respect
“clean”, to get under the bed to search for dust bunnies and to rub out any sign
of filth even if it was on the pipes in the basement.
Mother said someday
those tasks would be an important part of my role as a wife and mother, that I
would be judged by the polish on the credenza and smoothly combed hair of my
children. These were rules in familial
relationships in the 50’s and I followed the teaching religiously for the first
seven years of my married life.
Then I went
to work outside the home. I still tried
to be all things for all people, but over time I began to shrink under the
weight of the added tasks. Reality took over. One husband and a sink full of dishes later
and I was in a new reality, an independent woman with two kids and a career.
Then Joe
come along and we married and successfully negotiated a new set of marital roles. After I retired, I began to revert back to my
gut level values as the one responsible for the home. Oh, I carried on with creative outlets in art
and theatre but my chief focus was Joe and my role as a wife and now grandmother.
Then one day
Al showed up. I watched as this cunning
adversary began to systematically rob Joe of his independence and slowly
disable him physically and mentally while at the same time stealing my
identity.
I’m not talking
about what’s in my wallet. I’m talking
about something far more important, my well established familial role as Joe’s wife
and partner.
How could Al
do that?
I think of
myself as having both a wife and a caregiver identity. If I’d drawn a pie chart
before Joe’s disease was identified, all of the pie (the whole pie) would be wife
identity, encompassing our version of a typical domestic marital relationship. (This is a slippery slope because today there
are new typical married relationships, very different from those 20 or 30 years
ago. Today couples develop a rhythm to
their married lives that works for them; he does this, and she does that. If I’m an accountant, I might manage the
family money, or if Joe is a chef, he might manage the kitchen. For us as a couple, that would be our typical
martial relationship.)
Now because Al
(the cat burglar) is insidiously slow, changes in role identity/responsibilities
happen gradually. For me, caregiving began
as I took on tasks that were not part of my
typical division of marital labor; in our case it was financial planning,
paying bills, house and car repairs, tax preparation, administering
medications, and so on. So a slice of my
pie gradually became caregiver identity.
Time passed
and the weight of these tasks has grown heavier as my wife identity has shrunk. It (wife identity) now represents only about
a half of the pie chart; as Joe’s needs for care advance, and without a way to
off-load some of my growing responsibility, eventually the wife identity portion
of that pie would all but disappear. At that
point Al, the master thief, would have successfully stolen my wife identity.
And by the
way, just as I’m moving more and more into the caregiver identity, Joe is steadily
moving out of his typical role in the
family relationship, and has many of the same struggles with loss of identity
that I have. (I’ve written a blog about
the battle of the steering wheel.) But
things as small as not being the one to pay the check in a restaurant or
pumping your gas resonate as losses for Joe.
So maybe
having a housekeeper won’t be so bad.
Maybe it will allow me to focus more on just being Joe’s wife and chief
supporter, without some of my ridiculously dated identity clichés that have
become burdens. I know that other
transitions in our relationship are inevitable, but I’m okay just moving one
foot in front of the other, staying ahead of Al, the Identity Thief, as long as
I can.
This week we
returned to the surgeon for another bout with skin cancer. This time it was on Joe’s ear. We thought the procedure might require a bit
of plastic surgery, so I asked Joe if he would agree to a skin graft or just go
with a tortured genius look of Vincent Van Gogh. Somehow Joe didn’t think that was funny.
It turns
out, historians argue that Vincent may have made up the whole story about
cutting off his ear, that it was actually ripped off in a fight with a friend. Who can you trust?
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Forget the Pie Chart...I ate it. |
