Social Capital

I went home for Christmas during my divorce and ended up staying nearly a year and job hunting. 

My dad had Alzheimer's and he was the man of the house in an old fashioned marriage. My mom was twelve years younger than him and freaking out about a bunch of genuine serious problems that were being compounded by her being unwilling to cross some unspoken boundaries rooted in their old fashioned marriage.

I had previously run a discussion group called Wired for Science and both my sons were on it. It was a space for posting articles about neurological stuff and discussing that through the lens of how people live with such things, so all three of us knew stuff about dealing with people with wonky brain stuff happening.

One issue: My mother was understandably very stressed out about my dad's memory issues negatively impacting his medication schedule. 

In addition to Alzheimer's, he had a heart condition and Gout and he was on multiple prescription drugs. She had a pill dispenser but he couldn't remember if he took his pills or not.

So some days, he didn't take his medication and some days he took it twice. For an elderly man with a heart condition, this is potentially life threatening.

Unfortunately, she was dealing with it by screaming at him.

One day while standing side by side washing dishes with my mother, which is less threatening than face to face conversations, I quietly said "Why don't you lock the drugs up? Screaming at him won't improve his memory."

She moved his medicine to a fire safe in their bedroom and without even locking it, this put an end to it. I think she began only leaving out his pills for that day.

She was astonished and laughed about how easy it was. 

Dad was a big guy with significant dietary restrictions and he never learned to cook for himself. He tried to make himself coffee once when I was a kid and boiled all the water out the pot and melted the pot onto the burner, requiring an electrician to fix it. 

Mom never let him near her stove again. He was allowed to use the toaster and eventually the microwave when those became available.

She was still working and would come home for lunch to try to make sure he was fed. Her trying to make sure he ate at a specific time when she was there was another source of screaming fights while she worried he would starve.

So when I showed up, dad somewhat often pulled a tub of ice cream out the freezer and ate directly out of the ice cream tub because that was all the food prep he could handle independently.

Me and my kids cooked regularly for ourselves and my very aspie oldest, the son who was the reason I started Wired for Science -- his brother joined later because we talked so much about it and he was feeling like he was missing out on something -- did a lot of the cooking.

Since he has substantial history of neurological issues, he understood my father in a way most people did not.

One day, he was making German potato balls and my dad looked like he was ready to stick his hand in the boiling water. My son promised to give him some and gave him a bowl as physical proof of intent and told him to sit down and wait.

When the potato balls were ready, my son served his grandpa FIRST. 

Everyone else in the family habitually lied to Dad to get him out their hair on the justification that he wouldn't remember. There are different forms of memory and impaired people do remember even if they can't consciously recall it and describe it, so they stop trusting you when you pull stunts like that.

So with feeding grandpa FIRST, my dad trusted him and after that would wait at his place at the table patiently when my son cooked.

We regularly made Cornish hen and at that time, none of us ate the wings. So my son would put the wings on a plate and leave it at grandpa's place at the table because no one else ever sat there. 

The first couple of times, grandpa asked if it was for him. After that, if there was something left at his place, he knew it was his.

My mother eventually began leaving a bowl of supplements at dad's place at the table. With food and supplements routinely left at his place for him to eat whenever he felt like it, he began eating better without anyone fighting with him about food.

He eventually stopped eating ice cream out the tub. He was no longer slowly starving.

At some point, I asked my mom if I could give Dad a supplement and she agreed. For two weeks, I would discuss it with him and he would look at the jar and ask questions and eventually say "If Helga said it's okay, I guess it's okay."

And then I would stir it in water. Over the course of the two weeks, the process got simpler and easier and I eventually just began setting the cup at his place and he would take it.

When I got a job and moved out, my mother discontinued the supplement. Shortly thereafter, my dad's condition dramatically worsened and my mother preemptively said "That's just how it goes with Alzheimer's." before I could suggest it was related to the supplement being discontinued.

No, we never really got credit or respect for improving my dad's health and extending his life, but I knew it would come back to me materially because I was family and as long as Dad lived, Mom had more income than after he died and she would be generous to me simply because I was her daughter so long as she had the means to do so.

In contrast, my sister and brother have not felt any need or obligation to be generous to me in recent years while they had good jobs and I lived in poverty, so my sister's lack of recognition at how much I did for her means my generous support of her career and improving her house etc hasn't really come back to me and never will.

So now that my mom is dead, my family is basically me and my sons. My sons love me and respect me. 

My sister and brother are kind of like the family in Million Dollar Baby.

The clip doesn't show it, but they nominally come to visit her and go to Disneyland before seeing her at the hospital and don't tell her and don't invite her because she's a quadriplegic. Then they want her to sign her money over to them.

When I lived in a 2100 square foot house on a military base in Southern California, my sister and her child came to visit us and her husband came out a few days later to treat us like a cheap hotel and go see Disneyland and Hoover Dam as a once in a lifetime cheap vacation.

While there, it became apparent my sister was pregnant and having issues. 

I went to the ER and my sons sat unaccompanied in the waiting room while her husband and child left to go back to my house and the next day he and the kid went to Hoover Dam to not waste the trip before they all three flew home early because my sister was miscarrying.

My sister has the worst taste in men. I would have divorced him on the spot for leaving me to bleed out his child while he went sightseeing.

That was a big turning point in my relationship to my sister and not in a good way. So my current feelings have been a long time coming and this is not some surprise ending.

I played unpaid nanny for a month for my sister.

I added thousands of dollars in value to her house helping her paint and wallpaper.

Etc.

I get treated like the poor relation who is only there with my hand out, which is not true. And the fact that she has a high paid career in part because of me and my extraordinary support gets no acknowledgement.

Though I imagine if I won the lottery my sister and brother would both be quick to have their hand out. And act all shocked if I tell them no.

I'm a nice person and I was happy to help my father and sister etc because they were family. My mother was good back. My sister wasn't. I'm done being generous to her.

And I'm pretty sure this is fundamentally the same dynamic behind how a lot of marginalized people get screwed, so I'm filing it under Native even though I'm not entirely happy with the piece.