The man looked at Matt, our son, and asked, “What do you do?”
Matt gave his practiced answer. I wish I remembered what it was; it was a
really impressive answer and made me proud our son had such a great job
description. Marty and I made a good man…yes,
it was all us, okay maybe Matt did part of it on his own but we loaned him DNA.
The guy looked at me and I knew he was about to ask me the
same question. I hate the question, I
don’t have a real defining job or label and I don’t like any of my answers,
they either seem trite, inaccurate or over involved.
More than ten years ago, before the strokes, right before my
corporate divorce from big business Marty had warned me, “Get an answer to the
question, because people want to know what you do.”
She had been down sized, she had gone through the work identity
struggle and while not having income from work is the worst, the second worst
is that you lose part of your identity when your job goes away.
I’m prepared for the question, sort of. Even before the man asks me what I do I am
mentally sorting through my options:
“I’m a caregiver; I take care of my wife, she is a stroke
survivor. She had her first of two
strokes almost ten years ago and that’s what I do now. It takes a lot of time and there is a lot of
anxiety involved and I’m not really a medical kind of guy but it is frankly the
most decent thing I have ever done. “
This is not the answer I want to give. It’s too long, too convoluted and the din and
clang of the people and machines around me made a long answer too difficult,
besides I don’t want to get the “aww, that’s too bad” response with the accompanying
sad looks.
With this answer I also have to describe Marty’s life by
providing her a label, a name, a reason for her existence. She is not a stroke victim; Marty has never
been a victim in her life. In spite of
the fact that Marty is my hero I have never been fond of the whole stroke hero
thing. Stroke survivor, yeah, not so
much, stroke patient, not really…..I don’t know….I just call her my wife and
she has had some strokes.
Label, schmable…
The 2nd option is to say I’m retired. This is mostly true but frankly I don’t like
that answer because I am much too young and handsome to be old enough for
retirement and I don’t feel retired most of the time. I clean up dog poop from a 17 year old incontinent
dachshund, my life is directed by four care givers and a wife, and I manage the
intricacies of a Marty’s major illness. My life vacillates between boredom and
high anxiety and the whole thing is demanding and simply saying retired does
not feed necessary parts of me, my ego and my id.
The last option and one I choose most of the time is to
simply say, “Nothing.” I laugh a little
and say, “I don’t do anything”. It’s
short and sweet and just self-deprecating enough to get a smile and generally
shuts down the whole idea of having to explain my existence by the way I feed
and clothe myself.
Marty gets it. On one
of our trips to Dalhart U.S.A. to see Marty’s mother, her mom, before she quit
talking, asked me what I was doing now. Before
I could answer, Marty, the two stroke survivor, chimed in, her sarcasm meter on
high, and I quote, “He sits on the couch and watches TV.”
Now that’s not true at least not in broad daylight.
Marty was right ten years ago, you need an answer, we all
need an answer to help people understand us and to help us with our own
identity. I’m really pretty cool with my
new one; I’m comfortable being a care giver, being the husband to Marty and the
other women who direct my life. I’m cool
with being the father to Matt and Erin, the father-in-law to Lyle and Sarah and
the son to Bettye and Larry. It really
is where I belong.
I just need a short answer for the question, it does come up
and people really want to know.
