Too Much Life

Good Grief, three weeks since I wrote last, too long. Very much has happened in my life and we are all still settling down. People who know me, see me and ask how I am (most know there has been much stress) and I am simply not sure. I am not sick, I am not feeling bad, I am not depressed. I am overwhelmed most of the time. At least recently. My father has moved into our home. And I think it will be ok. He has lived alone for decades and it must be a terrible time for him to accustom himself to house rules and other people's habits. It must be terrible to think that you have to be dependent or that you need to give up your home, your space, your ability to make all your own decisions. It must be hard to eat on someone else's schedule instead of going out for chinese at 10 p.m. It must be extra hard, at eighty-one, to have to learn where all the stores are, the banks, the gas stations, when you've been going to the same places for the same decades. It is hard, too, from this side of the equation, to try to incorporate a lot of someone else's things into my home. Trying to figure out where guests will sleep and having to spend a great deal of time sorting through someone else's belongings. So, it is hard all around. Suck it up I say. What an opportunity to do something good, to pay back the help he has given me. Truth be told, we haven't had a particularly "normal" father-daughter relationship; he isn't your usual sort of dad. But he loves me I know, and he has always been willing to bail me out. So it is my turn to bail him out. The answer to the question of how I am is that I am just having a little too much life at the moment. Someone asked me today why I was doing it, why I didn't send him to an assisted living facility. First, he wouldn't go, he would just have chosen to remain in his home, at risk. Second, what other answer is there than that he is my father. Isn't that enough?