Attitude

If, as Woody Allen says 90% of life is showing up, I think we can draw a parallel and say a big percentage of our experience as family caregivers is our attitude. I’m not going to hazard a guess and put a number to it. Woody Allen is a comic and was going for a laugh. Being a family caregiver is nothing to laugh about.

I was reminded of this the other day as I was working on the revision of my book: Love, Honor & Value: A Family Caregiver Speaks Out About the Choices and Challenges of Caregiving (Capitol Books 2002). The revised edition is due out in the fall under a new title: A Family Caregiver Speaks Out: It Doesn’t Have to be This Hard.

In Chapter 2 (will be chapter 4 in the revised edition) I talk about attitude and how your approach to life can really make a difference in how you fare as a family caregiver – whether you are someone who thinks of their glass as half full or half empty. Here’s what I wrote:

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How do you view your glass, as half empty or half full? Caregiving may bring forth a common grab bag of emotions, but how we deal with them is very individual and reflects our attitude toward life in general.

A year after Cindy [the friend with whom I started NFCA] and I went on our respite to the beach we were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to go again, but at the last minute she had to cancel, so I went by myself, which wasn’t an easy decision to make, but I’m glad I did. I needed to do some thinking, some soul searching, and this gave me the opportunity.

It was a rather sad time for Steven and me because he had recently gotten his first wheelchair, the scooter no longer being sufficient for his needs. Although the wheelchair definitely made our day-to-day life easier, it was a symbol of his growing disability. It caused the old emotional wound that started with the diagnosis to reopen, and so once again I had to confront my fears about disability and our future, my sadness and my pain, and Steven had to confront his as well.

While at the beach sitting on the sand and soaking up the warm rays of the sun, alone with my thoughts and feeling, I wrote a poem that was inspired by of all things, a beach chair. The poem erupted out of my brain in only a few minutes, and poured onto the writing pad that was propped up against my thighs. It was a very dark poem, reflecting all the painful emotions the purchase of the wheelchair engendered. It expressed my fears and my anger. It was the visible representation of the pain that I held inside. It was a poem written by a woman who definitely saw her glass as half empty.  The sun was shining. I was enjoying a respite, and I decided to try and think about Steven’s need for the wheelchair in a different way. I ripped up the first poem and began again. The poem that came from my inner core the second time around was more upbeat. It looked at the doors that the wheelchair opened for Steven and me, not the ones that it had closed. This is the poem I called The Chair, but wonder now if I should rename it Life Depends on Your Point of View.