befogged

My father’s recent operation was, I suppose, the catalyst. It wasn’t a serious op - just a knee replacement - but it proved to be the flagship for a relationship shift that’s been creeping for a little while.

It was, you see, the first time I drove my mother somewhere because she needed something and had no other access to it than through her youngest child. The first time Dad couldn’t help Mum around the house, placing the burden entirely on her - even when he worked and she didn’t, he cooked the Saturday meal and shared the Sunday lunch marathon. The first time I’ve really seen my dad in pain, frustrated, and even a little helpless.

Though my parents are both pensioners, that knee op was the first really noticeable sign of increasing physical frailty - oh, they’ve had the usual tics and niggles, but aside from their hearing aids (a thought to conjure with for someone who’s always had over-sensitive hearing - inherited, as it turns out, from a mother who’s been wearing digital aids for years!) nothing that the younger population doesn’t also have from time to time. Nothing that really slowed them down, made them change how they lived, how they communicated, nothing that meant I found myself making extra sure I was available to help, feeling responsible for alleviating their current burden, even if all I could do was run Mum about a couple of times and pitch in more when I visited.

It brought about a change in our conversations, too. My mother, who has always refrained from anything resembling pressure for grandchildren, has suddenly started to become more obvious in her desire for them. Where ten years ago Mum was, as mothers seem to be, anxious about my life - and dietary - choices, now as well as our normal weekly chat-about-whatever there’s a weekly update on the status of various illnesses and frailties. Lump scares, future operations, the eye condition I’d no idea ran in my father’s family until he was recently diagnosed, blood pressure monitoring, the revelation that my barely-remembered grandma was severely anaemic, the fact that my mother has spent the last fifteen years nursing a recurring hip niggle that she’s never really felt to be severe enough to consult about with a doctor. The admission, most of all, of tiredness.

I’m reminded, suddenly, that my father is just a few years younger than my other half’s grandmother. It’s unsettling, this sudden pressing down of frailty, the creeping feeling that here begin the years where the balance of worry shifts from parents to children.

And yet, it’s not all negative. Strange as it may sound, my parents and I are closer now. I suppose the essence of it is that our relationship is more adult. They ask advice as well as providing it. I provide support as well as requiring it. We chat on more equal, more human terms. Their frailties admitted, my understanding improved.

Daughtering is, it seems, changing.