I became obsessed with playing music and wanted to play as much as I could and work on my “bucket list”. Things were going in that direction, but in life, my journey has never been a straight line or included just one thing. I also have a bad habit of trying to “fit ten pounds of potatoes in a sack designed for five pounds”. When my sons were playing sports, I balanced watching them, coaching them and playing sports myself. My career was important to me, so I made sure that I put in the time and effort to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful, but I also was careful to choose jobs that would give me the flexibility to make my family and my personal goals a priority. To make this balancing act possible, and when time is limited, something must be eliminated or changed. You need to learn to “able” yourself.
To able myself to get a lot done became obvious, I needed to reduce the amount of sleep that I needed in my schedule. I remember taking seventeen credit hours of course work in college and working thirty-five hours a week. In college I existed on limited sleep and I eliminated a lot of social opportunities. I didn’t have a lot of money so eliminating things that cost money became a challenge to find free things to do in small windows of time in my schedule. There are a lot of things that are fun that don’t cost a lot of money, but finding time in a busy schedule tends to eliminate a lot of opportunities. For me, I was able to find jobs parking cars at three of the top country clubs in the Washington DC area. Most of my time was spent parking cars during events that were on weekends and lasted until the last car was brought up to the customer at the end of the night. My other job was on campus in my dorm, and I could set my own hours as the dorm’s custodian.
Those times in college set the tone for most of my working life. I learned to adjust to less sleep and looked at fitting more things in my schedule as a challenge rather than a burden. After I bought my second house, I learned that I could spend time with my boys, play sports and keep up with responsibilities as a homeowner and the owner of a rental house by cutting the amount of sleep that I had in my schedule and by finding small windows of opportunity in my schedule to get things done. I learned to cut my lawn even though it was already dark outside. I learned that working in bad weather was a challenge, but doable. I also learned how to work on houses by myself. I learned that it was important to do things with family even when I wanted to take a break from work and just sleep. This wasn’t as hard as it seemed because I watched my parents do this for most of their working lives.
It is interesting how our minds work. We think about what we are doing and make an assessment. Often, we commend ourselves for doing such a great job. Sometimes it is years later that we realize that our children and our partners had a different view of what we did and how it seemed from their point of view. I realize now that I was selfish with the amount of time that I spent playing sports and hanging out with my buddies. I also realize that I can’t change what I did, but I can change what I do going forward.
In 2000, I made a change in my life that changed everything. Our sons had graduated from high school, and they were on their life’s journey. Without discussing my decision with my wife, I asked the head of our division to eliminate my job in the company’s reorganization rather than eliminating a job of someone that reported to me. I was sure that I would be given a generous package as an officer of the corporation and believed that I could go back to being a Guidance Counselor in one of the local school districts. I wanted more time to spend with my wife who was a first-grade teacher, and I wanted to be off work during the summers and every major holiday.
This worked out very well for four years until we received a call from one of the people that we hired to assist my wife’s parents with cooking, cleaning and driving them to appointments while we were on a three-week vacation. We didn’t realize things could deteriorate so quickly. Later, after my wife and I observed how needy they were as we took over their primary care, we felt horrible that we didn’t pay closer attention to just how much assistance they needed. We lived more than a hundred miles away and visited, and people were coming to their house on a regular basis, but we didn’t see how much help they really needed. When we were there my wife cooked and cleaned, and I took care of projects around the house and outside. We insisted that we should take care of things that needed to be done, but we should have paid more attention to what they were doing and how they were doing those things. What we have learned will hopefully help our children look at what we do and how we do things as we continue to age. We are trying to able ourselves by talking to our children about what we learned and have conversations about concerns that we have as they come up. We learned that it is not a good idea to tell your children that everything is fine, when you know that something is wrong.
Most people make plans for what they are going to do when they are more financially able and have the time to plan new activities, vacations and excursions. Life has a way of redirecting us. Life has a way of presenting us with challenges that we didn’t see coming. The question is how you handle these unplanned challenges to your life. In our case, my wife is an only child, and we were thrust into this new challenge and immediately had to figure out what we were going to do. It was June of 2004, and we were off for the summer. My decision to go back to education and a school year schedule was now making our life easier as we were now caring for parents in their 80’s.
My wife’s father died in 2005, and her mother’s medical and cognitive issues continued to deteriorate, and she eventually needed to be placed in a nursing home. We learned during this experience that you really need to do your homework in selecting a nursing home and you need to have sufficient resources to afford a nursing home that you would be comfortable living in. This has been an on-going conversation between my wife and me and our financial advisor. I would strongly advise that this decision and the research necessary to make an informed decision is not ignored.
By the middle of 2008, my wife and I had started to have opportunities to resume a more normal and enjoyable life. Her mother was close to our house, and it was easy to stop in and make sure that things were going well. We were able to spend time at the beach and to resume our trips to our oldest son’s house in North Carolina and even some trips to Florida. Things were going great and then we received some devastating news. My wife had breast cancer. Shortly after that, her mother passed. For some reason, maybe because of our faith and our faith in advancements in medicine, we felt like this was going to be okay. I remember thinking about something that I often said when I was working with students and their parents: “When you can’t change the circumstances, control how you deal with those circumstances.”
My wife is a cancer survivor, and she retired from teaching in 2009. I continue to marvel at the wonderful medical professionals that helped us get through her treatments. I think about the wonderful hairdresser that worked with women that were being treated for cancer and how he knew exactly when to shave her head before her hair fell out while he had her looking away from the mirror. Then he put on her new wig and started to adjust how it looked as he turned her toward the mirror. He then started to talk to her about their next appointment. I knew at that moment the difference between disabled and abled.
I finished my working career in 2019, and I often think about all the students and student athletes that I worked with. I remember the students that had IEP’s and 504 plans and marvel at the great teachers that were in our school and how hard they worked to ensure that those students were able to succeed and advance. These successes don’t come by accident or by casual conversations. Somehow, we must take responsibility for our family members and ourselves and make plans to become able rather than slowly becoming disabled. It needs to be a conscious activity and requires honesty when we are talking to the people that may be expected to take on this responsibility. I don’t want to thrust this on my children, but I also realize that my wife and I were caught completely off guard because no one in our family talked about this possibility.
Now I am seventy-six, retired and looking to add music, travel, learning to speak Spanish, having a vegetable garden and the list goes on. However, I have made sleep a priority because it is a healthy thing to do and have built in a lot of social opportunities into my schedule. My wife and I have been great in supporting each other in the things that we both are doing, but my perspective has changed. It has been exciting working on my bucket list and our bucket list, but she is having some mobility issues, and we need to figure out how to do things differently. The vacations we were planning need to be adjusted to accommodate her mobility needs, and we haven’t figured out what exactly needs to be done, but our goal is to start creating a plan to allow us to be able to continue with our travel plans. We have decided that we will focus on how to get this done rather than the problems that will surely present themselves. I will keep you informed, but please send us your thoughts.
Abilities Not Disabilities 