Difficult Seasons

Without doubt, the best preparation for becoming some one’s care giver is to develop an adult-adult relationship with them before you become his or her care giver.

I didn’t realize how important that was until I had already become Dad’s caregiver.  During my adult life, we’d spent lots of holidays and vacation time visiting together, and we’ve always gotten along well.  But we never had the opportunity to work together on a project, to do problem solving together, to share a responsibility as a team.

Our relationship was typical father-son.  It was built on mutual respect, love, and centered around family and church.  I didn’t give him advice unless he asked, and he didn’t give me advice unless I asked (mostly anyway).

After Mom died, our relationship did change a little.  We’d get together at least once a week for lunch, and our conversations did begin to evolve to occasional advice seeking and problem solving.

So when a health crisis occurred that required me to take some decision-making responsibilities for Dad and required a drastic change in where and how he lived, we both struggled to figure out how to relate and how to problem solve under these new conditions.  The situation was further complicated by the fact that his second wife Carol, who had recently started treatment for advanced ovarian cancer and was being cared for by her children in their home in another city, was part of the decision-making process.

I can remember vividly how uncomfortable I felt having to try to get Dad to do what doctors and family and I thought he needed to do.  I decided early on to do my best not to tell him what to do.  I attempted to become his advisor, and generally that worked quite well.

I investigated options, such as housing, and presented them to him as options, something for him to consider.  He responded well to that, and as his physical condition improved, we began working on issues that needed addressing together.  As things stabilized in his life, he increasingly became able to resume essentially all of his own decision making within his new constraints.  And by spending lots of time together and working together on problem solving, we’ve developed an adult-adult relationship that’s richer than just the father-son relationship we had before.

Looking back, there are some things I have learned, and some things I would do differently:

1. I was totally unprepared to become a care giver for Dad, and it is only through God’s providence that things have worked as well as they have.
2. If I had it to do over, I would be more intentional about working to develop an adult-adult relationship that included joint problem solving experience and teamwork before we encountered a crisis.
3. I would do even more than I did to make him feel more independent earlier, because the more independent of my help he felt, the more things he became able to handle on his own.

Maybe you can learn from my story and accept my encouragement to begin and continue working on nourishing your relationships in preparation for times of crisis.