Family Squeeze (5 page)

I took my mother-in-law to Madame Tussaud’s
Chamber of Horrors and one of the attendants said,
“Keep her moving, sir, we’re stock-taking.”

L
ES
D
AWSON

Men past forty
Get up nights,
Look out at city lights
And wonder
Where they made the wrong turn
And why life is so long
.

E
D
S
ISSMAN

I
n my thirties I was an unbeliever regarding the Midlife Crisis. In my forties, I flew through various stages in rapid succession: skeptic, agnostic, and the one at which I have now arrived—convert. Nothing about my childhood prepared me for getting older. For one thing, I thought my schoolteachers would kill me. I was thirteen when I realized my name wasn’t Smarten Up. But somehow those frazzled teachers restrained themselves and here I am, waking up each morning
gazing into the mirror at a middle-aged balding guy who looks exactly like my dad, and thinking to myself,
You have two options: Shave and keep moving, or break the mirror
.

A friend of mine says you officially enter middle age when your age starts to show around your middle. Another reassuring soul claims it arrives when both your parents and your children start telling you what’s best for you.

For some of us, the Middle Ages is an emotional state of anxiety in which we realize that the expiration date on our bodies is rapidly approaching, causing us to reflect on the fact that we have accomplished little since placing third in the eighth grade science fair for our research on firecrackers.

The German word for midlife crisis,
Torschlusspanik
, literally means “the panic of closing doors.” (The Russian word is
Vuttzadealwithmyhairs-cavich.)
Somewhere between the ages of thirty-eight and fifty-three, most of us enter a life stage where our children begin staying up late after tucking us into bed. Who knows what they’re doing? They could be writing their names on the back of our expensive knickknacks.

The following questions may help you determine whether or not you are in the midst of such a crisis. Then again, these questions may not help at all. But I hope they’ll be good for a smile or two.

1. When I stand in front of the mirror, I:
   

   1. Thank God for His awesome handiwork.
      

   2. Close my eyes and grind my teeth.
      

   3. Can see my rear end without turning around.
      

2. My hair is:
   

   1. A wavy, natural blond.
      

   2. Hair? Yes, I remember hair.
      

   3. Like a struggling oil company. Good production, poor distribution.
      

3. I believe we could solve this global warming thing:
   

   1. If all of us would just drive Smart Cars with seating capacity for three people who, combined, weigh as much as a Rice Krispy square.
      

   2. If my kids would just keep the refrigerator door closed.
      

   3. If we could find a way to harness my hot flashes.
      

4. When I look at my teenager, I think:
   

   1. This child is a delight!
      

   2. Who swapped the baskets in the hospital nursery room?
      

   3. For this I have stretch marks?
      

   Twenty-Eight Fabulous Facts About Getting Older
   (There were more, but we misplaced them.)
   

   1. Life insurance salesmen don’t call.
      

   2. You can work up an appetite filling the bird feeder.
      

   3. No more hair on your pillow.
      

   4. All the heartburn makes it easier to diet.
      

   5. You’re old enough to die of natural causes.
      

   6. You can’t hear your spouse snore.
      

   7. You’ve finally paid off your college tuition.
      

   8. No more hang-gliding accidents.
      

   9. Your plaid pants are back in style.
      

   10. You get mail every day: bills.
       

   11. No more midlife crisis.
       

   12. You have more bridgework than all of Venice.
       

   13. Tuck in your shirt or leave it out. Who cares?
       

   14. You have a new lease on life because the doctor has given you three years to live.
       

   15. Your parents don’t tell you what to do anymore.
       

   16. You’re off the Army Reserve list.
       

   17. You can withdraw from your IRA without penalty.
       

   18. You’ll never go through puberty again.
       

   19. No more high school exams.
       

   20. Others offer to carry your luggage. And you let them.
       

   21. Your skateboarding grandson wants your old tweed jacket because it’s cool.
       

   22. You learn new vocabulary words like “macular degeneration.”
       

   23. Stay up as late as you want. Sometimes until 8 p.m.
       

   24. Entertain neighbor kids with your false teeth.
       

   25. Dinner at 3 p.m.
       

   26. Senior discounts.
       

   27. The police used to warn you to slow down, now it’s the doctor.
       

   28. Your kids don’t ask for money. They just want it in the will.
       

5. The following statement best describes me:
   

   1. I am happy in my workplace, content with my body, perky, fresh as a spring morning.
      

   2. It’s a miracle that I’m not out on a ledge somewhere.
      

   3. I am so confused I dropped my mother off at soccer and my daughter at the gerontologist.
      

6. When it comes to my job:
   

   1. I get goose bumps knowing what a blessing I am to have around.
      

   2. Job? I ended my last one the way I began it—I was fired with enthusiasm.
      

   3. I didn’t have to work until I was four. It’s been nonstop since.
      

7. After a visit to the doctor, I:
   

   1. Am seeing the benefits of eating well and rising at six each day for my nine-mile jog.
      

   2. Comfort myself knowing that my memory may be going, but at least I can retain water.
      

   3. Begin considering acupuncture. I mean, when was the last time you saw a sick porcupine?
      

8. When I think of finances, I:
   

   1. Know I am right on track due to wise fiscal planning that started when I was twelve.
      

   2. Am wondering how to reconcile my net income with my gross habits.
      

   3. Know that I have all the money I’ll ever need if I die by 2 p.m. today.
      

9. The following best describes my view of aging:
   

   1. Thanks to antiaging books and natural herbs, I will be in peak physical condition well past a hundred.
      

   2. I don’t plan to grow old gracefully. Like Rita Rudner, I plan to “have facelifts until my ears join together.”
      

   3. Except for the occasional heart attack, I feel as young as ever.
      

10. When I see my daughter being picked up by her date, I:
    

    1. Give thanks that she has finally met such a fine gentleman.
       

    2. Wish I had installed razor wire in the front yard.
       

    3. Feel like I’m handing a Rembrandt over to a chimpanzee.
       

11. My favorite song is now:
    

    1. Johnny Nash: “I Can See Clearly Now.”
       

    2. Roberta Flack: “The First Time Ever I Slipped a Disc.”
       

    3. B. J. Thomas: “Hair Plugs Keep Fallin’ Off My Head.”
       

If you answered “a” even once, please leave the room and don’t come back until you apologize to the rest of us and are carrying chocolate. If you answered “b” more than twice, please study my book
Laughing Matters
. If you gravitated toward the “c” answers, you qualify for the Midlife Discount. Ask for it at fine restaurants everywhere. Tell them Dr. Phil sent you.

The other day I looked in the mirror and realized once again that I don’t have trouble growing hair. But location is a problem. And location is everything when it comes to hair.

I have placed several helpful sayings throughout the house. In my study is an old Ira Wallach quote that says, “Statistics indicate that as a result of overwork, modern executives are dropping like flies on the nation’s golf courses.”

There’s a Bible verse on my fridge: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30,
KJV)
.

And now there’s the Midlifer’s Motto on my mirror: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).

I love the word
renewal
It speaks of better things ahead. It reminds me of a God who has promised to make all things new one day. I began to hang on to that promise a little more tightly as we entered uncharted territory with Mom and Dad.

I do wish I could tell you my age but it’s impossible
.
It keeps changing all the time
.

G
REER
G
ARSON

F
or five years my parents lived in the suite we built for them, witnessing the onslaught of our teenagers and raving about their new life. “The best years of our lives,” Dad told us over and over again. They loved having teenagers careening around the house. Each morning the sun rose through their living room window. And each morning Dad was greeted by our Maltese dog. The two were inseparable. Dad fed the pooch bananas for breakfast; she would take them from no one else.

Then came the first signs that my father’s forgetter was working overtime. Mom found the ice cream under the sink one day, and when she asked Dad how it got there, he joked: “Oh, it was too hard for my dentures.”

His sense of humor was intact, but he often grew disoriented, forgetting what organization he was employed by for twenty years, referring to childhood places as if they were just down the street and asking me to take him there.

One night I found him in his favorite chair, his eyes glazed with tears. “I don’t know where I should go,” he said. “I have no work.”

Mom pulled me aside, almost frantic. “Is there anything we can do?” After several visits to the doctor, Dad was diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s, that slowly encroaching thief who reduces brilliant scientists to babbling children and saints of God to cursing sailors.

Though he remained kind and gentle, Dad frowned more often, as if he were trying to navigate an unfamiliar car through a strange city, thinking east was north.

I sat with him at night when I could, watching his Toronto Maple Leafs, a struggling hockey team that has offered him mostly misery for years. When we talked of old times, his eyes brightened.

“Remember when you used to cut my hair?”

He smiled.

Dad was no more trained in cutting hair than I am in flying helicopters, but that didn’t stop him for a minute. Someone had given him a set of hand-me-down electric clippers, and every once in a while he’d oil them up and take them for a test drive, which is to say that he would sit his sons on a stool, drape an itchy sheet over our bare shoulders, and flip a little switch. The clippers alternated between gentle hum and chain-saw decibel without warning, and if parenting is about making memories, this was parenting extraordinaire.

“Just take a little off the sides,” we would beg, knowing full well that Dad had always wanted to be a farmer, and this was as close as he would get to haying season.

“Eh?” Dad would say. “I can’t hear you.”

After spending a few minutes on one side of my head, he would go around to the other, and—relying solely on memory—try to even things up. I wore a lot of hats back then, dreaming of a time when crew cuts would be back in style.

Dad sat in his rocking chair and grinned as I reminded him of
those days. Then he took me by surprise. “It’s your turn,” he said. “I need a trim.”

Few things have given me greater pleasure than this sweet revenge. But as I cut, I thought about the days ahead, and I began to worry. There’s an old Jewish saying: “Two things in the world you absolutely should not worry about: what can be fixed and what cannot be fixed. What can be fixed should be fixed at once, without worry. What cannot be fixed, can’t be fixed—so why worry about it?”

It sounds good on paper, but I come from a long line of gifted worriers. And so as the days passed, I worried about what to do next. And I asked questions of God, questions I’d never wrestled with before:
How can someone who has spent a lifetime loving and serving You be rewarded this way? What purpose is there in this anguish, in this seeming abandonment? How do I do the right thing given these circumstances? How do I honor my father when honoring him will surely include putting him in the hands of strangers more qualified than I one day soon? And by the way, I have other responsibilities too, Lord. I know I’m not supposed to feel resentment, but it’s creeping in
.

One night while running my hands along a shelf filled with books my father had given me, I came across the story of an aged man who lived in his only son’s house.

When evening came, the whole family would gather around the big oak dining table to share a meal together. The son and his wife treated the old man well. And he took great pleasure in watching his grandson Matthew grow. He loved to take the child onto his lap and tell him stories.

As the years slid by, the old man’s hands began to shake. Sometimes he would spill his tea because of those trembling hands, or he would drop a bowl. And little by little his son became more and more impatient with him.

One evening, as the family sat at the dinner table, the old man accidentally hit his bowl with the soupspoon and the bowl broke in half, spilling soup onto the tablecloth and onto his lap. His son stood to his feet and hissed under his breath, “I’m tired of you spilling food on our good tablecloth and breaking our good dishes! If you can’t eat with manners, eat alone.”

The next day, the son brought home a wooden bowl. He set a table in the old man’s bedroom, using an old sheet as a tablecloth, and served him his food in the wooden bowl.

The old man said nothing and ate his meals alone day after day.

One day when the son came home from work, he noticed Matthew working on something in the corner. “What keeps you so busy today?” he asked.

The boy looked up from his work. “I’m making a bowl, carving it from wood all by myself,” he said.

His father was surprised. “A wooden bowl? What will you use it for? We have such beautiful dishes.”

The little boy answered, “I’m making this bowl for you. When you grow old like Grandpa, and your hands begin to shake, I’ll have this wooden bowl ready to give you in your little room.”

The man stood still, staring at the bowl. Then he rushed to his father’s room and fell to his knees. “Forgive me, Father. Forgive me for not showing you the respect and honor due you.” And he wept.

The father forgave his son. And that evening when the family gathered at the big round table, the old man sat at the place of honor.

I bit my lip hard at the conclusion of the story and pledged before God to honor my dad in this mysterious new chapter of life. And I wondered about my own children. What would they do with me when it’s my turn to put popsicles in the dryer?