Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Aunt Bee or Alice! Where are you?

I have decided I need to find one of them for our household. For those of you who are not immediately picking up on this due to being younger than me, Aunt Bee is a character on the "Andy Griffith" show of Mayberry. She was Andy's aunt. He is a widower with a young son, Opie. Alice is the live-in housekeeper for "The Brady Bunch". These women are not so noticeable on these shows and quite taken for granted. However, the older I get, the more I appreciate the role these women played in their fictional TV family lives. Everyone else runs in and out of the house, having adventures and dramas while these two steady eddies keep the houses running like a dream, plus take care of the myriad details for their loved ones. I really need one of these women here to help us! In 1998, my grandmother came to stay with us for 3 months in order to have a serious surgery and be supported by our family through it. After she was over the initial shock of the surgery and still facing her intense physical therapy, she was physically in our home most of the time. There was no energy for shopping or sight seeing. So she utilized observing our lives as a distraction. She was shocked by my calendar and all the entries on it and all the running here and there. Now, I had reduced my calendar during this time in order to be available to take her to PT 3 times a week. I did not work my part time job during this 3 months, thanks to my hero husband for taking my workload on. She observed to me she had a new appreciation for my life since it was totally different from hers when she was raising her kids. She told me she did not know how I did it. I had always managed to take the kids and make the 4 hour trip to visit her every couple of months, but before her stay with us, she would let me know in subtle ways she wished she could see us more often. After her return to home, she was just grateful we were able to make it that frequently to see her. In a couple of years, I will be finished raising our children (and finished with the whole homeschooling thing!) and look forward to returning to my profession fulltime. Yet, I also feel trepidation. How will the household run at that time? What I do here is valuable to our family, even the ones who come in and out for Sunday dinner or a visit during the week. I am just so available to all of them. This past Monday, I spent the whole day on the phone trying to make 3 (count them! only 3) Dr. appointments for my husband and I. It turns into an all day thing to make appointments now. I can never watch a rerun of those two shows now without focusing more on Aunt Bee or Alice than on the main characters.Their presence makes the lives of everyone else easier. Lest anyone think my husband is a deadbeat around the house, he is the reason I was able to do all my grandmother observed. We have always helped each other since the beginning of our marriage. I guess together we make an Aunt Bee or Alice and I will have to rely on that when I merge back into the busy highway of fulltime nursing!

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