Weekend at Dad's

I wanted to share a little about my weekend at my parents’ house. I enjoy writing about personal things, but I also wonder sometimes if I should have more boundaries. I probably won’t solve that today. But if The Courage to Be Disliked is right, the best place to start is just accepting myself as I am, in this moment.

But before I tell you about my weekend taking care of my dad, I had to flip a coin. In honor of today’s Super Bowl between the Chiefs and the Eagles, heads is red and green is tails. Heads I paywall it, tails I don’t, and it was best two out of three.

And Heads it is, so this is paywalled. Shoot. I am pulling for the Eagles, so hopefully I didn’t jinx anything.

So what then are you missing if you aren’t a subscriber? Basically you’re missing a story about me helping my dad have a bowel movement, figuring out how these plastic urinals work, moving him from the bed to the portable chair toilet and me sort of amazed that my mom has to do this every day. In other words, you’re missing a great substack. So consider becoming a paying subscriber where most of the time, I am flipping a coin to determine what does and does not become available.

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Weekend with Dad

The weekend with dad has gone well. Mom got away, thankfully, to Nashville to spend the weekend with her sister and brother. My aunt’s husband died last year, and since then, my mom and her have been getting closer. Which is funny to say I guess because they are already close, but I mean closer as in this particular stage of historical life together, they are spending more time together. So having the weekend to get away was good for my mom. She sent me pictures of the dinner that my uncle made everyone (steaks) and it sounds like they just sat around laughing and talking and being together.

There also were no spectacular failures that happened while she was gone too. I told myself really all I have to do is pick dad up out of his bed and move him to the toilet, pick him back up, move him back, clean him, and so on. But I would consider it a spectacular failure if I mismanaged that in some nontrivial way. It’s funny though — if you do something enough times, then Murphy’s law says you will eventually have something happen, and I could easily see it.