Tea with Dad

I live with my father in the house that he and my mother bought and planned to live in for the rest of their lives. Their dream home. The house she died in far sooner than anyone could have expected.

I moved in during 2013. He was 82 then, almost 83. I was almost 61. Anyone looking at us might think I moved in to care for my aging father. I moved in because he made me. I wouldn’t have said so then, in fact, I didn’t, but I was completely broken down or close to it. So, I told myself, and let others believe, that this was something I’d planned all along, which to some extent I had. Just not then and not in the way it happened.

There is a lot written about aging adult children living with their already aged parents. There should be. But that’s not why I wrote my book.

Moving in with Dad was not as easy as I anticipated. I was surprised by how awkward I felt living with my father again. Surprised by how easily I slipped back into patterns I’d followed as a child. Not because he expected it, but because due to the distance between us, it was easier to fall back on the familiar.

It took me a while to understand that I moved into my father’s home with unpacked emotional baggage stuffed with things I’d carried around for decades. And, I was surprised by unresolved issues—issues I’d attributed to my mother’s and my relationship, not his and mine. For the first months, the experience was filled with surprises. I knew I had changed. Somehow, it never occurred to me that he had, too. I walked around in a perpetual state of surprise, so I tried different tactics, schedules, attitudes, viewpoints. . . . I remember my father watching me and probably wondering to himself, “What the hell is she doing?”

One day, I took a break from my work from home, and I walked downstairs to make a mug of tea. I heard Dad in his den and asked if he’d like a mug, too. Soon ‘tea at three’ became an everyday occurrence, as did our short conversations during which we got to know one another better. One of the first things I learned was how little, outside vital statistics, we knew about one another. We reconnected and revised our relationship.

I tell people now that if I had not moved in with Dad under the circumstances that forced it before he needed me to, we would have muddled through living together like many adult children and their parents who find themselves in that situation. But we would not have done so with the understanding, respect, and love we have for each other now. Or the ability to express all that. That took time and talk and tea. In part, that is what my book is about.

The rest is about what I learned while living with my father during this late stage of both our lives. It changed our relationship. I learned who he and my mother were before they married, who they became after marrying and becoming parents, and how they lived after their children left home. This helped me edit my personal narrative, and each day I rediscover a little more about who I am and have always been.