My Good Boy

Seventeen years ago when I told my dad that Robert and I were getting married, he was not impressed to say the least.  My dad rarely gave his opinion on my decisions, his approach was always to let me get on with it and be there if I messed up.  On this occasion he felt so strongly that he told me what he thought, and his thought was that this was going to be a big mistake.  When Robert was a teenager it seems he was in my dad's opinion, a bit of an idiot.  I didn't know Robert then because at the time I was married with young children and therefore not paying any attention to 16 year old boys.  Seven years later my circumstances had changed and Robert and I were together.  I asked my dad to give him a chance and he said he would.  Over the years I was pretty sure that Robert had managed to change my dad's opinion.  Now let me tell what has been happening for the last few weeks.

My mum is now 91 and has dementia.  She cannot do all the things she used to do, and she is the one that needs looking after.  When we were little my mum and dad had very traditional roles in the home.  Even though they both worked full time, my mum did all the cooking and cleaning.  My dad's contribution was doing the dishes and some dodgy DIY.  My mum once told me that many years ago she had asked my dad to help her with some housework and clean the windows.  He did it, and when she pointed out to him that he had missed the corners he threw down the cloth he had been using and announced that he would never do it again. Now I don't know how accurate that story is, but I don't have any memories of him doing housework.

My mum and dad have always been independent.  They are the type of people who just cope and get on with things.  They don't ask for help, unless it's to do with something technical like the tv going wrong or the computer not working properly.  We knew that dad was now having to look after mum and do so much more around the house, and I think we assumed he would cope because he always had done.  Over the last few months it was beginning to become apparent that maybe my dad wasn't coping as well as we assumed. I hadn't thought about it until now, but because dad had never had to look after children,  or do all the daily things that needed doing to keep a home up to scratch that he actually didn't know how.  But how do you approach your dad and tell him that at 84 he needed to start doing things differently?  I had been thinking about this for weeks and finally plucked up the courage to go round and talk to him.  He said he knew that there were things that needed doing and he knew he needed to do something about it.  So together we started making plans on how we could do a few things that would make looking after mum a little easier for him.

Then Robert happened.  Over the last few weeks, Robert has been at my mum and dad's house practically everyday.  He has organised a professional cleaner to come in every week and do all the cleaning that my dad can't.  He has, with my dad, gone through every room in the house, including the loft and cleared out all the out of date food, all the empty boxes for products my dad no longer owns, all the piles of hoarded junk that was taking up valuable space in their one bedroom bungalow.  He has fixed things and moved things and helped my dad buy a few things for the house that are going to make life better, like a chair for my mum that reclines and also helps her stand up. He has been to the council and arranged for all the jobs that needed doing on the house like fixing the boiler, mending the guttering and installing an extractor fan in the bathroom, to get done.

Last Sunday my dad came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said "you've got a good boy there.  He's been brilliant".