The Learning Curve

Who knows where it will lead.

Photo by Chayse Larsen on Unsplash

When you find yourself living alone after 37 years as half of a partnership, you realize pretty quickly that you’ll need to re-learn a number of things. I started thinking about some of those things long before Mike made his transition to memory care. Others have come as a surprise.

I understood, for example, that I would need to learn a new path through the grocery store when I was shopping only for myself. I no longer need to make sure we have a box of shredded wheat on hand for Mike’s breakfast each morning, along with a steady supply of Gatorade and bananas, to address just some of the many symptoms of autonomic dysfunction that are often a part of Parkinson’s.

But I definitely didn’t think about the fact that I was going to need to learn how to use new lawn tools. Historically speaking, lawn care had been Mike’s job; I took care of planting, watering and weeding the borders and raised beds, and I had a small set of hand tools that were more than sufficient for those tasks. I’d never bothered to learn how to use a string trimmer or rotary edger, since cutting the grass was not my job.

I hired help with mowing and edging the front yard (since it’s the part our neighbors see) many years ago, when Mike wasn’t able to handle those jobs anymore. I ignored the back yard as much as possible. Eventually, I did have to teach myself how to use the mower—but even then, I ran it over the grass only when it grew absurdly long.

Once Mike moved into memory care, though, I had the mental space to start paying attention to some of the things I’d been ignoring while in daily survival mode. That’s when I looked at the back yard and realized that what had been a jasmine border around our deck now threatened to overtake it completely: the tendrils winding up the legs of a built-in bench now made it look more like a trellis.

When I walked outside to get a better look, I realized the stone border of that jasmine bed wasn’t visible, either. And the leaves from our giant live oak tree hadn’t been collected and mulched for the raised beds (or bagged and set out for collection) in recent memory; that was a project Mike and I had always taken on together. They’d simply accumulated in a thick layer wherever the wind left them.

I stood ankle-deep in leaves as I assessed this situation. Then I walked to the other end of the yard and opened the shed door. It was clear that most of the equipment in there—everything other than the lawnmower—was going to be way too big and heavy for me to use, even if I could figure out how to use it.

Apart from learning what new lawn care responsibilities my life will include, I’m also learning a new daily schedule. I don’t have to drive Mike into the city for his dementia care day program anymore; that means I can leave home half an hour later, drive straight to campus, and arrive at work in plenty of time. I still find myself zooming around in the morning before I remember that morning rush hour traffic is no longer a concern, praise be.

Neither is afternoon rush hour. I always tried to get to Mike’s care center, pick him up and get both of us safely home before the traffic really kicked in again. But now, most days, I can stay on campus as long as I want: if I’m in the flow of working on a project or grading papers, I don’t need to keep one eye on the clock so I can wrap things up and get on the road. I don’t even need to check the traffic report to identify the best route for getting where I’m going, because whenever I get there is fine.

I visit Mike at his memory care facility in the afternoons, after stopping by home to feed the dog and let her out. But last week I got home from campus one day and collapsed into a chair. Half of my students were out sick, so I was pretty sure my body was doing battle with something. And I’d spent the whole week grading student work from every one of my classes. I was exhausted.

Still, I tried to convince myself to leave the house and visit Mike. I reminded myself that I wouldn’t see him the next day, because I had back-to-back meetings scheduled—and that meant it would be two days before I could see him.

Have a snack and drink some water, I told myself. Then you’ll feel better. But I didn’t. I wound up falling asleep in that chair, and I peeled myself out of it just long enough to eat a sandwich, put on my pajamas and go to bed.

When I talked through this scene with my therapist the next day, I told her how guilty I felt for not being able to make myself get in the car and go. What kind of care partner am I, if I can’t even support my husband in such a very basic way?

“Wait a minute. Help me understand this,” Eleanor said. “Finding Mike a place in a facility where his needs are being met 24 hours a day isn’t providing him support? Doing all that paperwork, scheduling all those appointments, setting up his room and making sure he has the supplies he needs—that isn’t support? What is it, then?”

I sighed and rolled my eyes, as I do whenever Eleanor points out an obvious flaw in my thought processes. “Okay, fine,” I said. “That’s also support.”

“For what it’s worth, I’m proud of you for not going,” she added. “You listened to your body and gave yourself the time you needed to rest. And—this is important—nothing bad happened! You violated your imaginary schedule, which no one else was holding you to, and nothing bad happened. So what does that tell you?”

I paused for a long moment. One of the reasons I keep seeing my therapist is that she’s really good at leading me to the point where I have no choice but to say the quiet part out loud.

“Maybe my imaginary schedule is unrealistic,” I said. “And maybe what I’m telling myself I should do is different from what I actually can.”

I’m learning, albeit slowly, to give myself some grace in these moments when I can’t meet my own (very high) expectations. I’m also trying to adjust those expectations in ways that are less likely to leave me feeling disappointed in myself.

I’m learning, instead, to focus my energy on what I can do. That’s why I bought myself a handheld electric trimmer and took on the jasmine bed last weekend. It’s a tough plant, which is why it grows so well in the south Texas heat. Its graceful tendrils actively resisted my efforts to cut them back, at first. But then I came up with a method: I gathered a bunch of vines, like gathering hair into a ponytail, and ran the trimmer through each one. I worked my way backward through the overgrowth, and I kept at it until the stone border finally revealed itself again.

I also discovered a paving stone that had disappeared beneath the tangle of vines at one end of the jasmine bed, and then another. My new little edger made quick work of the tall grass that had grown around the edges of those paving stones as well.

I remembered the day Mike and I added those pavers to our yard, how we stood on the deck and talked through where we wanted them to go. One path—the one I could still see clearly—headed off in the general direction of the shed. I’d have to trim those edges, too. But the other path—the one I’d forgotten all about—pointed toward a patch of shade at the heart of our back yard, where Mike and I used to sit in our lawn chairs and relax with cold drinks after getting our small patch of earth under some measure of control again.

Neither of us could have envisioned the forking path that would bring us to where we are now. But I have the tools I need to keep moving forward in this new direction. I’ll just need some time to figure out how to use them.