The Year of the Possible

There's mold in the upstairs closet. I don't know where it came from, but I know that removing it will involve moving the clothes out of the closet and a bucket of hot soapy water. I will have to get down on my hands and knees and scrub away the evidence of a neglected space. 

Maintenance can be uncomfortable, because you have to face down the things you've been neglecting to do. I visited my mom last week and she has been neglecting going to the dentist for years. By the end of my visit I had her repeating that 2022 was the year of the dentist. Covid has been hard on my mom who has limited mobility. Quarantine took away her shopping trips which were her main way of participating in the community and provided physical activity for her. 

People have a hard time grasping what it is like to have a schizophrenic parent. They don't understand the amount of neglect and hardship this has on a person and their family members. I know from first hand experience how incredibly difficult it has been.  With over 30 years of experience in caring for a parent with a mental illness I can say that it never gets easier but my ability to cope with it gets better. 

I have integrated this care into my career and have talked to my employers about needing to work remotely so I can spend time with my mom. Having that small amount of transparency has helped with my ability to handle the responsibility of a full time career and part time caretaker. I am fortunate to work for an employer that offers unlimited flexible time off. I only wish everyone had this sort of padding in their lives.

My mom has lots of people in her life who support her, but mentally ill people often have difficulty accepting the medical care they need. My mom trusts her children more than anyone and that puts a weight on my siblings and I to help. In return my mom has offered unconditional love and shown me what success is by an entirely different standard than then our status driven work orientated lives would lead us to believe. 

Success can be caring for oneself and caring for those closest to us. As much as I enjoy be celebrated as a seasoned professional it only takes one conversation with my mom to remind me to take none of it for granted. We don't know when illness or injury is going to trip us up. Embracing this truth on the deepest, scariest of levels is the thing that makes the victories all the more sweet. Here's to 2022 - the year of the possible!

 

Slow Down

A small victory was won when I changed the filter on my furnace. Using the maintenance tracker app I have logged when I perform a task and schedule when I need to do the task again. Its a low hanging fruit item on the spectrum of home maintenance, but when you are lost in the haze of project deadlines and getting dinner on the table for a family it can quickly drop off the radar. 

As an empty nester, I have time to move methodically through my maintenance tasks. This slowing down in my life has allowed me to slow down in work. In projects I can sit with problems for longer and not feel the pressure of heading a household also weigh on my shoulders. I like this not just for the obvious reasons, but because complex problem solving is a process of digestion and repetition which takes time.

One of the main problems of civil engineering is the handling of stormwater. The root of the problem is the impervious surfaces (roofs/pavement) we experience in our day to day lives causes stormwater runoff which has to be handled somewhere else. The public's expectation of runoff is out of sight out of mind, but for a civil engineer the teasing out of a solution is a symphony of factors. 

We see our environments as a backdrop to our lives, but when we take small steps to interact with our environment we become more than actors on a stage. A task as small as changing the furnace filter can become a shift in perspective: we become stewards of our environment.

According to a research study 76% of my son's generation place our environment as their number one societal concern. People of his generation will choose to not have children in order to reduce their environmental burden. This elective empty nesting is saddening to me because people who are willing to make that sacrifice are also the type of people that make good parents. 

Finding time to slow down and methodically solve problems is not exactly a movie poster solution for the climate crisis, but it is imperative as we develop more land in the twenty first century to do so before our nests are preemptively empty.