I am in the time in my life where some call me a “tweener.” I understand that term to mean that I still have a child at home to take care of and I have elderly parents that I help out from time to time. Fortunately, my parents, who are in their eighties, live on their own and are self-sufficient. However, they are needing my help more and more as they age.
Just the other day, my mother called me to let me know that her niece was in town. She told her niece that she would have me drive downtown to get her, then bring her back to my house, let her visit for a while, then take her back downtown and return home – all before or shortly after midnight, I might add.
This was on a work night, in the middle of the week. I respectfully told my mother that I could not be the taxi service this time, especially since I lived an hour way from downtown, making that a two-hour round trip, twice! To which she replied, “Okay, dear.”
On any given day, I can be found helping my high school son study for an Honors class or rebounding for him as he shoots free throws. Making sure he has a nutritious dinner every night and food in the pantry every day is also one of my “Tweener” duties.
So when my dad asked recently if he could travel with us to an out of town basketball tournament, I took a deep breath. Mixing a 17-year-old’s needs, with my husband and 84-year-old father, and then plopping us in a car ride that last five hours, was not going to be easy! Do not get me wrong, I love my daddy and he is fun, but he has slowed a bit in his years and he is definitely set in his ways.
Case in point, he wants to wake up very early at the hotel and then tell everyone else what time it is, and how we need to all be up and going. We just pull the covers over our heads. Soon he will announce that breakfast is open; we try not to move, hoping he will go away. Finally, he again says, “We are wasting the day away,” and he proceeds to make a lot of noise to force us out of bed.
My daddy also has the (what I will call) annoying habit of asking me questions that he for sure knows the answer to. “Why are you drinking that water, daughter?” “Will we be eating on this trip, daughter?” “Are we having fun yet, daughter?” I know he is trying to be funny but …
Another small, minor, almost insignificant issue that I find interesting is that my daddy takes a lot of small naps. He just dozes off! You are talking to him one moment, and the next he looks like a chicken with her head in her breast, just resting away. The naps only last about 15 minutes, and once he wakes up he is ready for all of us to watch a Western, “Columbo,” “Ponderosa” or some show that was made in the 1950s.
All the while my teenager is asking if I have seen the shorts to his uniform or if I can order him a phone case on Amazon. Sometimes I feel like I am stuck in between two very different worlds, bouncing from one to the next.
Once I have watched three episodes of “The Wild West” with daddy, found my son’s shorts and let him order his phone case, I try to have some rare time to myself. This is when I usually try to read a book or just sit in silence. However, recently, in that rare, quiet time, I thought about the fact that possibly in the not-too-distant future I will not be a tweener anymore, because my parents will no longer be here.
As I glance over at my daddy, who was once again “napping,” that one single thought brings tears to my eyes, and then I realized that those silly questions that dad ask me are not so silly after all. Being a tweener should mean being placed between two generations that make your life worth living.
