Sydney Avey's Blog, page 14

Clearing it out: a meditation

Ourson visits on Father’s Day, pokes around in the refrigerator, and pulls out a bottle of BBQ sauce with an expiration date of 2002. He holds the bottle up in front of me and points to the offending date.“Seriously, Mom?

Time to clear out the fridge.

In yoga class the teacher invites us to clear all thoughts of the day’s activities from our heads. I tick through my “to do” list and wish for a “Clear All” button to press. I visualize a screen full of “to dos” disappearing. Then the screen in my...

Assisted Living: Bottom line and blessings

When you find yourself the point person for relocating your aging mother, the bottom line is that you now manage her life. It becomes your responsibility to ensure that her bills get paid, she gets to her medical appointments, and she has appropriate clothing. (Older people can’t deal with clothes that challenge their agility.)

Here are some steps we took that made the process work.

Where possible, establish yourself as the responsible party and form relationships with everyone who is involved...

Book Review: Palo Alto

Palo Alto: Stories by James Franco

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up in vacation off a B&B bookshelf because I’m interested in artists who work in more than one field and because I was born and raised and raised my children near Palo Alto, but a world away.

Writers sometimes write to process their experiences. This appears to be Franco’s motivation for penning this memoir turned short story collection. I found myself having difficulty sorting out the voices of the different disaffected te...

Assisted Living: Dividing lines

When you move in to give assistance to an aging parent, the dividing lines between parent and child, yours and mine, begin to blur. At the same time, the divide between cultures and generations sharpens.

No matter your situation, whether you are nobly stepping up to your responsibility or bravely wrestling control away from a parent who does not recognize their peril, you are bound to feel like the bad guy at some point.

The role reversal is uncomfortable. You look for ways to respect the digni...

The Adult Orphan

Becoming an adult orphan is among the inevitable rites of passage. The day an adult’s last remaining parent dies is a somber occasion.

In addition to the emotional cocktail of sadness, relief, gratitude, and other feelings, your position in life changes forever:

Your generational cover is blown.

You viefor position as the family matriarch or patriarch.

You become the memory custodian.

How will you record precious memories of the past for future generations to ponder? Stop by Mari’s Journal Writing...

Assisted Living: Tough conversations

Once you decide that someone you love and feel responsible for requires assisted living, you are in for a tough conversation. All previous conversations have been theoretical. This conversation will be highly emotional.

Even if your relationship is one of love and respect, you will likely encounter resistance in the form of silence, tears, anger, and accusations (not necessarily directed at you, but it is human nature to cast about for someone to blame.) When she wasn’t feeling confused and s...

Book Review: the Living Room

The Living Room by Robert Whitlow

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A friend gave me this book and and said she thought I would like it because I’m a novelist. The process through which Amy received her inspiration did intrigue me, as did her interactions with her agent and the publishers’ perfidy. I do wonder though if it is only authors who find these interactions interesting.

I found Amy’s angst over whether to share information she received intuitively (for lack of a better word) with her co workers t...

Assisted Living: When it’s time

Does any parent ever decide on their own to move into assisted living? I told myself that my mother-in-law made this decision when she purchased long term care insurance. Her brother lost his home and ended up in a trailer on his son’s property, dependent on the care of his overworked children. She did not want that for herself, or for us.

Knowing this, why was I tossing in bed at 3am, feeling intense pain in my muscles? Why did my heart break and my brain accuse me of callous selfishness? Bec...

Discombobulated: a word study

Discombobulated is a word I use when I’m out of sorts and don’t know why. When I am in

a state of frustration,

a stew of perplexity,

a stymie of confusion,

I feel discombobulated.

This tongue tripper, a 19th century Americanism, was coined in the days before Words with Friends, when people amused themselves with the dictionary instead of an iPhone app. They coined cleverisms by altering simpler words, in this case, discompose or discomfort.

Some trivia: Discombobulate has six syllables that contain...

Find the Joy

© Andrew Kazmierski | Dreamstime Stock Photos

1.

Some days you have to look hard to find the joy. The Portal fire is blowing smoke our way from the community of Foresta that houses Yosemite Park employees. An eye-stinging reminder of what we suffered in the Rim fire last year, we say prayers for our neighboring communities.

Ash seasons our already muggy air as if some heavy handed chef dumped too much slurry in the soup, and I begin to lose my taste for this day.

2.

Joy is an emotion, a feeling of...