The Habit of Love, 2024

A new version of a theme from last year - Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from me and my right hand dog, Finn, here at TOOS HQ! May your holiday be as beautiful as this lovely fall day was back in October.

First off, I wanted to express my gratitude this Thanksgiving for this wonderful community of Talking Out of School readers. This newsletter has created new connections, friendships and professional collaborations I never dreamed would be possible when I started out in June of 2022. You have truly widened my horizons, enriched my thinking and warmed my heart.

So I thank you all for being here and being interested in what I have to offer, scribbling away here in my Connecticut garret.

Below is a new version of a personal essay theme I published last Thanksgiving week. May you and your family have a lovely holiday, filled with love and connection.

With deep, deep gratitude for you all,

Julie

The Habit of Love, 2024

So much of life is made up of habits and ways of being in the world we don’t much think about until either we hit a wall, like burnout, or life events wake you up. Or, more gently, sometimes old habits just don’t fit in with new stages of life and new priorities.

I spend a fair amount of time wondering how my physical habits will eventually cause my body to betray me. You can’t help but have those kind of thoughts when you are a regular visitor at an assisted living center, or as my mother now refers to it, “the hotel.” I am a dedicated reader of the New York Times “Well” section and while it is frequently offering helpful ten minutes workouts to keep you vigorous and flexible, developing the habit of doing the ten minute workout is another thing entirely. One of the stretches I saw recently was a quad stretch I use to do not infrequently and when I tried it again… oh dear reader, not even close. I need to work up to it. I hope I can work up to it or, it’s possible, as they say in the eldercare biz, today’s attempted stretch is my new baseline. 

For a long time, I carried around this fantasy of what my “baseline” is, probably from some time in my thirties when I could still spend a day spontaneously walking in Manhattan wearing cheap shoes. Shoes are on my mind as I’m in the very sad process of weeding through my lovely, carefully chosen and cherished shoe collection, contemplating parting ways with any that do not offer extensive support for my beat-up, flat, middle aged feet. I can’t remember whether these shoes were at one time comfortable or I was more willing or able to put up with discomfort in return for a little beauty or the confident click, click of a striding heel. Either way, while it is really amazing how resilient our bodies can be with physical therapy and discipline, those ouchy-ouchy days are not coming back now that sneakers are socially acceptable everywhere. I’m not a fan of giving up but some realism and acceptance can be freeing.

I also fear, like many people since the pandemic, I’ve gotten too much in the habit of staying home and sometimes even the idea of social events can feel stressful or burdensome. One of my little mantras has long been, “it’s easier not to do something, but you’re usually glad you did.” And while I still intellectually believe that, there is something compelling about staying home in my comfy sweatshirt with the dog, rewatching The Americans. But I think there is a price to be paid for the cocoons we increasingly build around ourselves - the entertainment at our fingertips, the phones drawing our attention, the earbuds firmly in place when we go out in public. I am beginning to suspect it takes as much determination and discipline to fight social atrophy as it does to stick to a physical therapy routine, but I think both fights equally pay dividends in the long run.

A few weeks ago at my mother’s place, there was a small framed sign on the common area piano. That always only means one thing - one of the residents has passed. My mother’s neighbor across the hall from her had died. He had seemed somewhat hardy for a very old, very tall man who walked pretty slowly with a walker, but was reasonably upright and seemed to have most of his marbles, although he didn’t come out and partake of events and such as a rule. It turns out his pacemaker quit working. I didn’t even know that was a thing.

Death is part of the fabric of assisted living but when it inevitably occurs, none of the residents seem to remark upon it. Maybe they’re all talking about it in private but my sister and I are there all the time and we’ve never heard anyone discuss the death of a resident. My mom told me yesterday that he had gone home and I’m never sure if she means that metaphorically.

One time at Bingo, the prize box was depleted and Jordyn, the delightful activities staffer, told the players she would bring it around tomorrow for the winners to get their booty. So one resident said, “There’s always tomorrow.” And then nine nonagenarians around the table were repeating that sentiment or nodding along, with no sense of irony at all.

My mom and her friends are still adults who want choices and want to build relationships and have agency and they seem to live somewhere between denying their vulnerability and acknowledging they won’t be around forever. The highlight of my mom’s day is dinner in the dining room with her “ladies” although my sister and I have no idea what four pretty much deaf women with no short term memory talk about - but my mom’s face lights up when you ask her about it. But just like today when I had a mild disagreement with my mom when she didn’t want to wear a winter coat even though it was forty degrees out, she doesn’t even completely understand - or maybe accept? - how vulnerable she is.

Everyone is going to need someone to care for them, unless you are unlucky. Ultimately, your baseline resets downward. I once actually left a dinner party because I was sitting next to someone who would not shut up about how his 95 year old mother was traveling the world and insisting that there was no reason all of us couldn’t be like that. It just infuriated me. So glad she won the genetic lottery, I felt like saying. We can’t hold up a handful of elders who won the health game of chance as the norm. It just felt like such ignorant, careless denial to me, so judgmental of all those seniors who aren’t so fortunate.

And while you can’t live your life in order to build a safety net towards the eventuality that you will forget a lot of the past, or that your pacemaker will go haywire, you can build a life where you’ve invested in connecting. It’s an inclination and a personality leaning and also, a habit. Your social atrophy can be delayed longer than your physical one.

My mom has always been a social being with a deeply ingrained habit of seeking connection with others. Since my dad died, she created a narrative that she is responsible for a man in her neighborhood who has Alzheimer's and is pretty openly confused and sweet, although the story she’s created is that he has no family and he’s illiterate. When she can get him to go to Bingo, she sits next to him and helps him because he gets easily confused, and the second grade teacher in her sees this as a way to teach him letters and numbers. She has her dinner ladies - and even though the faces at the table change, she never mentions that. When we take her over to the main building to the cafe for lunch, she has a word for every staffer and resident we pass. She especially likes to chat with the female staffers about their hairdos and tells them all, “don’t cut your beautiful hair!” or to comment on outfits she likes. Recently, we were rolling towards the cafe for lunch and when she saw the head of sales, she opened up her arms to him like he was a long lost son. (Although after they hugged, exchanged a few words and he walked away, she said to me, “Who was that again?”)

If you nurture this habit of connection, this active, social, everyday form of love, people come out for you when you’re vulnerable. Aging that diminishes memory and reasoning and, in my dad’s case, made him very physically handicapped, are scary and mysterious. Aging is scary, period! That’s not all it is, for sure, but to deny that is to undercut a full appreciation for all the stages of life.

But despite the scariness and undeniable evidence of all the things out of our control, even in elder vulnerability, people remain essentially themselves. You can see it. Which is why this Thanksgiving I’m giving careful thought to the idea of intentionally fostering and prioritizing those habits of connecting and tending to expressions of love of all kinds.

It’s really easy in the world today to overlook opportunities to tend to love. I don’t mean just familial love or romantic love or that I’m saying, gee, I wish I had children so they would take care of me when I’m frail because let me tell you, if my experience at assisted living has taught me anything, that is not a sure bet. The opportunity to connect and the opportunity to love is abundantly available if we can just recognize it and cultivate it as such. If we can un-pretzel ourselves from all our immediate worries and take the time to connect, even in small ways, it makes an impact. 

For those of you who read my piece earlier this fall about my stolen car, I dropped off my rental car today and then Ubered to the auto body to get my recovered car yesterday. The good humor and friendliness of all involved was so appreciated. People like to hear when they’ve done a good job and it costs nothing to share praise - in fact, it feels as good to give it.

And when I realized my car did not have my license plate on it, the auto body folks could not have been more helpful, calling the police, and an officer showed up to help us out, apologize because the department should have stripped the stolen plates when they dropped it off and told me what to do until I could get to the DMV. Waiting around, we swapped holiday plans and talked about our families and what sides we looked forward to, which relatives were a pain to entertain and which were a delight. You know, life stuff. Human connection. Good feelings that aren’t deep or lasting or profound but provide the social lubrication that just makes life a little nicer for all of us.

My mom won’t be here forever and I try to channel her when I can. I realized that my sing-song “hello,” something a number of people have commented on over the years, is the same as my mom’s, except mine is (high - low) and her is (low-high). How did I never notice that before? It’s a reminder of how we carry our parents with us forever in ways we don’t even realize. I’m trying to seek opportunities to intentionally ingrain her everyday habits of love, to create a more robust social baseline.

And so I will end with a little love story - this is from last year, but it bears repeating, particularly for an audience of educators.

One of my mom’s former students, who was in the second grade in Waltham, Massachusetts in the 1990s, went to great lengths to find and contact my sister Marie because she wanted to get in touch with my mom. They had stayed in touch for years and years and years but once my parents moved to Connecticut, it was like she had vanished. Marie brought her up to visit my mom last week as a surprise. And now that they’ve been reconnected, we think she’s going to come visit again.

I’m not crying, you’re crying!

As EM Forster wrote, “Only connect.”

Happy Thanksgiving -

Julie