"Keep an eye on her"

Supposedly Son 1 got a job offer last week at a local supermarket near my apartment, and training is going to start some time this week. They were going to email him with information about when to start, and the email hasn’t come yet. Also, he is at Wife’s place right now. (See, e.g., the post just before this one.)

 

So last night I asked him … what if you don’t hear by Sunday? Do I come get you Sunday night? On the “yes” side … that way you’ll be here when (if) they contact you to start work. On the “no” side … the custody calendar (which doesn’t apply to him because he is 18) would have him at Wife’s until Friday.

 

He answered that he thought it best to stay where he is: “Mom’s better, but I’d like to keep an eye on her.”

 

At first I thought he was talking about her quasi-stroke last weekend. But no, it seems he was talking about her depressive spiral, the one that sparked our long conversation by text.

 

And I’m trying to figure out how I feel about this plan. There are a lot of pieces, and of course they pull in different directions.

 

At a purely selfish level, it is certainly a lot easier when I’ve got nobody else here. Nobody else to cook for, nobody else to plan around, nobody else to think about. I won’t go as far as Sartre, one of whose characters famously declared that “L’Enfer, c’est les autres.” But other people can certainly be a nuisance just by being there.

 

I have very little confidence that the supermarket will plan very far ahead. In principle if they want him to report on Tuesday you’d expect them to email him no later than Monday. But in practice I wouldn’t be surprised if they email him at 9:00 asking him to show up at noon. That would be a problem already because my apartment doesn’t have an Internet connection. But they also might call. He has a cell phone. And really I can get him only in the evenings after work.

 

It seems like a good sign that Son 1 is sensible and compassionate, that he cares enough about Wife to want to keep an eye on her … to make sure she doesn’t do something crazy, like try to kill herself. (The boys were already there when she tried to do that once before.)

 

But how much help is he really? Note that in the conversation on Friday he told me he had gotten to the point of throwing up his hands and deciding there was nothing he could do till she calmed down. Maybe she did calm down and maybe he was able to help … or maybe she just got over it on her own. I don’t know which.

 

This would mean that – for a while at least – both boys would be occupied this summer with caring for older relatives: Son 1 for Wife, and Son 2 for Father. What does that say?

 

On the one hand it speaks highly of their compassion, self-reliance, responsibility, and good sense. The world needs more such people.

 

So why do I feel uneasy about it?

 

The world needs compassionate and responsible people, but shouldn’t we exercise that compassion and responsibility down and out rather than up and in? Down to our own children and out to the wider community, rather than up and in to our parents (or grandparents) closed up inside the walls of our own houses? Spending yourself for the sake of your parents feels somehow indecent to me, as if they bore you for nothing but this – to serve them in their age. Taken to an extreme, it feels like a dead end, or a cul-de-sac … spending yourself always inside the house and never out.

 

Parents should serve their children – not by giving them whatever the children think they want, of course, but by raising them to be decent, compassionate, hard-working, responsible individuals; by disciplining them so that they learn. By teaching, by training, and by constraining – so that the children can take part as members of a civilized society. And this service is – by rights should be – all one-way, all unpaid. Or rather, it is paid by the children growing to adulthood in their turn and serving their own children in the same way ... or serving the community at large.

 

The bargain should not be, “I’ll take care of you so that later you will take care of me.”

 

Of course we do have to take care of our parents as they age. We help them move, we help them keep up, we help them with any number of things. In earlier ages and in other lands, there’s been nobody else available to help them and so the family had to rally around. I recently met up with a former colleague from work who had taken two years off to be with his parents as they died; now he was trying to get another job and found it tough, but he said, “You never regret the time you spend with your parents.”

 

So probably this is just my problem. Probably I’m the one who is out of kilter by finding it indecent. And certainly I’m making way too much of it right now.

 

Doesn’t stop it from bugging me.