After moving four times in three years, Mom has officially graduated from character camp.
“Life is to enjoy, not to control” is her motto. Making decisions and being organized exhausts her. “It’s fine the way it is,” she’ll tell me. Unfortunately for her, I don’t listen. During the character camp of moving, I forced her to make decision after decision about item after item.
My sister, Marie, got the difficult task of moving Mom’s stuff from her old apartment into her new apartment. The Manry clan got the task of helping put everything in its proper place. Mom and I have different views of the proper place for things.
Josiah was stuck in the middle of our disagreement.
He dumped out the large bags Mom had filled at her old apartment to sort the items into piles: cleaning supplies, toiletries, decorative items, clothing, baskets, etc.
“Don’t dump out those bags. I know what’s in those bags because I packed them. If you dump them out and put them away, I won’t be able to find my things,” she said.
“Mom, if your looking for cleaning supplies, they’ll be in the laundry room. If your looking for clothes, they’ll be in the closet, If your looking for dishes, they’ll be in the kitchen, etc.”
Josiah is very quiet and thorough, so he kept working while we argued.
Gabe and Zeke laid out two junk drawers worth of stuff on her kitchen table and began to sort through it.
Mom looked over and told Abby in a huff, “Just wait and see how your mother likes it when you lay out her life on a kitchen table.”
She followed this statement with, “Here, hide this box of rags in the pantry where your mother can’t find them, so she can’t throw them out.”
Eventually, everything was put away.
The damage from his stroke has required Dad to sleep in a different part of the retirement complex than Mom. They now have an apartment where Mom sleeps, and Dad stays during the day.
When I walked into the apartment, I was struck with the feeling that the place finally looked like their home. It was the first time Mom looked settled and not like she was staying for only two weeks.
The apartment is high up in the tree tops. There is a lot light and the table is right next to the window overlooking the deck. When Mom and I were sitting on the deck, a hummingbird flew up in front of us, hovered and looked.
“I bet the lady who was here before had a feeder,” Marie said.
The next morning, I brought Mom a feeder. She filled it and hung it up. (When Mom and Dad lived on Blue Lake they had a bird feeder right outside the window. When sitting at the table, we had a perfect view of the birds.)
Later that afternoon, I was sitting with Dad at the table near the window when Dale exclaimed, “There’s the hummingbird!”
Dad could see the hummingbird in his peripheral vision. “You’re home now, Kath,” he said.
I cried.
Character Camp has been hard on all of us in the Meloch Family, especially Mom and Dad. Life isn’t always what we wished it would be.
For reunion, Dale created a spreadsheet schedule. On the bottom he wrote “Developing Character – One Character at a Time.”
The Character Camp graduation party was a celebration. We called it the Meloch Family Reunion 2014.