08/25/2021
What feels like a lifetime ago I worked in home care. My primary focus was palliative care but once and a while I would get a client who just needed some extra help around the house. The act of giving of myself to make the life of someone else just a little bit easier was something I was and still am happy to do, that is what makes me fulfilled as a person and as a spiritual being. The job of home care is not an easy one, to come into someone's space and do things for them that they were once able to do can be challenging and on occasion the clients get frustrated and angry that they find themselves in a place where I need to be there for them. Once and a while something would take place that would create a new perspective for me and leave me with a fond memory. One such time took place when I worked briefly for a couple who definitely gave me a new perspective and a few fond memories, even if I was frustrated while living in the moment.
We will call them Mr and Mrs Bird.
Mr and Mrs Bird were a couple with early onset dementia. When I met them he was actually in hospital, I came to them to take care of her while their regular caregiver was on holidays. I spent a lovely quiet few days with Mrs Bird and learned a few things about her, like she regularly forgot that she had eaten and would go looking for food. She loved to listen to the birds and loved to walk around her community. But then Mr Bird came home from the hospital and suddenly Mrs Bird was not the same quiet little lady, she became mischievous and waited for any chance to escape me. The first night Mr bird was home we had a very active day, it was like wrangling a herd of toddlers with potty mouths. Every time I turned around one of them was off and "running" on me. Now I put running in quotations because Mrs Bird didn't walk very fast at all and Mr Bird was in a wheelchair that he could Paddle around in using his feet.
Bedtime rolled around and after I settled Mrs Bird in front of the tv I headed off to get Mr Bird ready for bed. Unbeknownst to me Mr Bird had taken offense to me calling his wife Love when I was talking to her and from the kitchen came a bold new voice. "She is my love not yours!" I turned a bit startled because I was sure I had left him in the bedroom, but here he was in the kitchen boldly staring at me and as sharp as a tack ready to set me straight. I started towards him to take him back to the bedroom and get him into bed and suddenly he was off like a shot. His wispy hair had stood up on end like the crest of a cockatiel and he was paddling those feet of his as hard as he could to avoid me. Around and around the island in the kitchen we went, me begging him to come with me and apologizing for upsetting him and him yelling at me the whole way around about his wife being his love not mine. I even tried stopping and going the other way to catch him and he just spun around and went the other way himself.
At some point in all this sudden chaos Mrs Bird had decided she needed ice cream and had gone into the basement and was pulling everything out of the freezer. Now I'm yelling down the stairs in my sweetest sing-song voice asking her to come back upstairs and to put everything away, while I continued to try and wrangle my little cockatiel of a sweet old man and settle him down. On and on this went, I ran downstairs and escorted her back up to the living room then off to the kitchen again to catch the raging bull that was her husband. By the time I cornered him she was off getting into something else. This went on for what seemed like forever, him angry with me for something he no longer remembered and her eating everything she could before I stopped her. At one point I even considered calling someone for backup. After what seemed like a lifetime, I was finally able to get them both settled in, cleaned up and ready for bed.
As I sat in my car unwrapping this turn of events in my head and trying to assess the game plan for tomorrow I had to remind myself that this was their world and I was just there to make life a bit easier for them. As I sat there with tears streaming down my face from laughing at the image in my head of what we all must have looked like and all my frustration rolled away I thought back to a lesson I learned from a Montessorian teacher a few years before. She told me that a child isn't a bad kid because they cannot find the words to express their emotions and they lashed out. We must treat every day like we have no knowledge of the day before and let the child be the lead on setting the emotional tone of the day. Our role is to guide them out of any negative emotions and into a place where they can process their emotions in a productive way. So I decided I wasn't going to create a game plan, tomorrow I would let Mr and Mrs Bird set the tone and my role would be to guide them to a place where they could be calm and happy.
To this day I cannot help but laugh everytime I think of my little cockatiel and when I tell the story of that night everyone has a good laugh at the images that arise. But I learned a valuable lesson that night, whether a child or an adult, allow others to set their tone and if they need help to get out of a negative emotional situation ask them how best to help them do that; and to make sure that the tone I set for myself when I am interacting with others is one of calm and peace because I don't want to be someone's little cockatiel, I want to be the one who calms the cockatiels.
For the record. The following day with Mr and Mrs Bird was just as chaotic. Turns out that was just life with the Birds.
