The Grandmaster Game of Ageing

When I first started worrying about mum and dad, how “old” they were getting and maybe the family needed to step in and help them to make a few decisions, they were in their mid-70s. Well, mum was actually 75 and dad was a sprightly 72.

Now that I am about to turn 71 and my husband 76, I realise they were way too young to have the family start interfering in their lives, and when I hear a hint of that “concern” in my own daughters, I get really annoyed and it puts me on my guard.

Half of me wants to chase their cars and snap at their wheels – which I know is an odd reaction, but sometimes an irritable and futile gesture is enough – and the other half of me just wants to bark, which is equally irritable and futile but without the running.

What I actually do is mutter and grumble. I can mutter and grumble all day if the mood takes me, about how annoying it is when people start worrying about you. I am not inviting a response or expecting a reaction, or heaven forbid, a discussion about how ‘It’s only because we CARE’. I utter and grumble purely for my own satisfaction.

Whereas young people always want to talk about things, they want a response, an interaction, an answer.

I know because until very recently I was that young person.

I was constantly asking mum and dad: What they wanted? What could I do? What could they do? (….to make what I wanted to happen, happen.)

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how my behaviour might have had a whiff of “parenting the parents”, treating them like children, patronising them. Even though my intention was to be adult to adult and not tell them what to do but rather gently suggest something might be good idea. Like, ‘Don’t you think you should drink some water?’  ‘Hmmmm….????’

‘I mean only if you don’t want to get dehydrated? I am not forcing you to drink water. It’s just if you do get dehydrated your blood pressure will drop and you will fall over and you might break something.  Like your HIP! But it’s up to you. I’ll just put the glass here beside you.’

I think that is what I miss about caring for my mum and dad, the daily battle of the wills. The psychological and strategic moves we all played to get what we wanted.

I would make us all of cup of coffee and we’d sit down like Grandmasters around an invisible chessboard and contemplate our moves.

Dad would try to keep the game friendly, moving his pawn out a couple of spaces with a fairly benign and familiar opening gambit:
‘You’re looking good. A blind man would be happy to see you.’

Mum, who was blind, would immediately bring out the big guns, her knight:
‘Jean, your father hasn’t had a shower for two days; he smells doesn’t he?’

This was a power move that immediately puts dad on the defensive, and my instinct is to play the protective parenting role and use my Queen to confront mum. However, I know that without mum’s insistence, dad would probably never have a shower or ever get out of bed. So, in many ways, when it comes to dad, we are on the same side.

I chose a less dominant bishop, ‘Dad, when was the last time you had a shower?’
‘I had one this morning.’
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘Well one of you is not telling the truth.’

This is a fun game we can all play. They force me into being the parent. Treating them like children. And I know all the moves because I learnt how to be a parent from them.

‘Let me look at you’ I check dad’s collar and give him a sniff. ‘He smells fine.’
Mum rolls her eyes and mutters and grumbles.
‘I am not saying he had a shower, mum, I am just saying he doesn’t smell.’
‘And he doesn’t clean his teeth.’
Dad laughs.

I can’t threaten dad with rotting teeth and painful fillings because dad had all his teeth taken out and replaced with dentures when he was 18, because his mum wanted him to have a “Hollywood Smile”.

‘Come on you two, stop fighting. Finish your coffee and we will go for a drive somewhere, get you out of the house.’

MWAHAHAH. Payback for all those times they took us kids on a Sunday drive when all we wanted to be doing was nothing, except waiting for Disneyland to come on at 6:30pm.

Three of us squished and gasping in the back of the car while mum and dad smoked and drove to look at nurseries. Not rivers where we could throw rocks, not beaches where we could collect shells but BORING nurseries. Nowadays, of course, I love nurseries. I won’t hear a bad word said about nurseries, and I often go to nurseries myself and admire the fascinating variety of thriving plants. I like to buy them and bring them home and watch them sicken and die no matter how much care I give them or how often I move them around the room.

‘Leave me here.’ says mum, ‘take your father to the shops and make him buy a new toothbrush.’
‘We’re either all going or no-one is going’ (straight out of the 1955 parenting guidebook, the one that includes, ‘you’ve got two choices for dinner, take it or leave it.’)
‘We need milk and snowballs’ says dad.
‘What happened to the bag of snowballs I bought you two days ago?’ I ask.
‘It wasn’t two days ago’ says dad.
‘He wouldn’t know what day it was’, says mum, ‘he sits on his computer all day and never leaves the room.’
‘Right, that’s enough you two, let’s go.’

We convoy to the car. Mum and dad pushing walkers. Mum sits in the front and I take her walker around the back, and as I hoick it into the boot, around 200 things fall out from under its seat. A dozen dusters, a magnifying glass, three pairs of tweezers, two nail files, a pair of scissors, an elastic bandage, 4 packets of Panadol, 8 hair combs, a hairbrush, about 14 hearing aid batteries and a purse.

I fold up dad’s walker and out falls the wrappers of 6 empty packets of snowballs, an avalanche of loose coconut, a couple of boxes of Gaviscon and a soldering iron.

I kick myself. I always forget to empty their walkers, and they always say ‘Sorry we forgot to empty our walkers’, but I suspect it’s deliberate. 

Payback for all those uneaten lovingly made school lunches they would find at the bottom of my school bag at the end of the week.

Is that a kind of stalemate?

At least there were no rotting bananas in their walkers. For that I am grateful, and I decide to not make them play sport.