I’m in the USA this summer, staying with my mother. She has been recovering from several heart surgeries and is now having some liver trouble as a result of her heart medication. I came here wanting to help and, more than anything, to be there for her. But I hadn’t quite anticipated what being there would actually mean—or how strange the experience of caring for someone you love can sometimes feel.
There is nothing particularly difficult about looking after my mother; I love her to bits. She is completely coherent and fun to talk to, and she is generally cheerful and optimistic. We do puzzles and crosswords, read, and watch television. We have lots of little conversations throughout the day. I make small meals that I think she might enjoy and try to tempt her to eat.
That last part is where we tend to bump heads. She has almost no appetite and can take one bite of something and announce that she is full. It is incredibly frustrating for me because I want so badly for her to get stronger and recover. She has already lost 50 pounds and is still losing weight, so every uneaten meal feels like a small defeat.
I am also exhausted. This has surprised me because, from the outside, it looks like an extraordinarily pleasant way to spend my time. I’m not doing anything particularly physically demanding. Yet I find myself needing an afternoon nap almost every day. There is something about being responsible for someone you love, constantly watching and wondering whether they are getting enough to eat, whether they are feeling better. This seems to drain you in a way that isn’t immediately obvious.
I’ve been here nearly a month, although it feels much longer. Time seems to move very slowly when you are waiting for someone to get better. That is one of the strange things about being there for someone. So much of the work is invisible, and yet you feel it in every part of yourself.
But there are also these extraordinary little moments of joy. My mother spends much of the day in bed, but somehow she can rally herself to play three hours of bridge. I find this both amusing and encouraging. Apparently, the prospect of sitting at the bridge table with her friends is enough to summon energy that I cannot produce with even the most creative meal.
There is something to be learned from that. Our passions really can motivate us to take action. We may tell ourselves that we are too tired, too busy, or too unwell to do something. But then something we genuinely care about comes along, and suddenly we find the energy. Perhaps one of the secrets to a fulfilling life is making sure we have enough things that we care about to get us out of bed.
While I have been here, waiting for my new home in England to be completed, I decided I might as well get my mother’s house in order. It’s a large, rambling five-bedroom house built in the 1800s, full of character and charm, with big capacious rooms and incredible inlaid wood floors. It is also, I have discovered, an enormous amount of work to maintain. We just replaced the water heater, which I didn’t even know was on the list of things that needed fixing. A family of bats has taken up residence in the attic. I know they need to be encouraged to find somewhere else to live; I can’t help feeling a little guilty about evicting them from their home. (I had considerably less sympathy for the hornets building a nest in the shed. That one had to go.)
The list of things to repair and sort out is overwhelming, so I’ve decided to start with something I can actually do: decluttering. I haven’t written about decluttering for quite some time, even though I’ve probably done more of it in the past year than at any other point in my life. Downsizing our family home after my divorce meant parting with more than half of our possessions. When you are forced to decide what can come with you and what has to go, you discover very quickly which things you actually care about.
So, naturally, when I found out that Marie Kondo had written another book, Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home: How to Organize Your Space and Achieve Your Ideal Life, I grabbed it from the library. I have to admit that I didn’t find much that was completely new to me, although I was delighted to see that Marie Kondo seems to have incorporated some of the criticisms I made of her earlier approach into this book.
I once wrote that if you have 50 beautiful teacups, as I do, and you hold each one in your hands and ask whether it sparks joy, you may simply spend the entire afternoon reminding yourself how beautiful your teacups are. And yet, I have to admit that there is something worthwhile in the exercise. When I went through my own teacups again, I discovered that perhaps one or two no longer had quite the same sparkle as the others. I kept most of them, but I did let a few go. It was a useful reminder that decluttering isn’t necessarily about getting rid of everything. Sometimes it is about reconnecting with what gives us joy.
I also appreciated Kondo’s acknowledgement of the physical limitations of our homes. Dana K. White has made this point brilliantly: our homes are containers, and they have a finite amount of space. No matter how much we love something, eventually there is nowhere left to put it. One of the things I particularly liked in Kondo’s new book was her suggestion that we should make sure that when we wake up, the first thing we see is something lovely. What a simple idea. Instead of opening your eyes to the pile of clothes on the chair, why not wake up to something that makes you smile?
It reminded me of something I wrote about years ago in Coach Yourself to Success: creating your ideal day. What does your ideal day actually look like? What would your ideal morning routine be? And what small rituals would make an ordinary Tuesday feel a little more like the life you actually want to live?
Reading the book, with its calming photographs, did something unexpected for me. It reminded me to slow down. Because while I have been slowly clearing out the clutter, I have also been realizing that there is something far more important than getting this house in perfect order: my mother.
I’ve started asking her to come and sit outside with me on the deck. I want her to get a little sunlight and enjoy being outdoors, but mostly I want to talk to her. I ask her about her father, about what it was like growing up. We talk about things I somehow never thought to ask about before. And she has all these wonderful little stories that I have never heard. It takes time to sit and listen, and time is exactly what I have suddenly become aware of. Being there isn’t about having the right words or knowing what to do. Sometimes it is simply about making yourself available for the conversation that happens when neither of you is in a hurry.
There is a difference between clearing clutter and clearing life of everything unnecessary. Some things deserve to stay, some memories deserve to be revisited. And some afternoons should simply be spent sitting on the deck with your mother. There are moments when being there with someone is more meaningful than doing anything for them.
My mother’s house will eventually be sorted out. The bats will have to find somewhere else to live. The water heater has been replaced, and the clutter will gradually disappear. But there will not always be another afternoon sitting on the deck with my mother. There will not always be another opportunity to ask her about her childhood or hear a story I’ve never heard before. Being there for those moments may turn out to be the most important thing I do this summer.
And perhaps that is what this experience is teaching me about relationships. We can become so focused on doing something for the people we love that we forget that our presence may be the most valuable thing we can give them. I arrived here with a list of things to accomplish, but I am leaving with a much stronger appreciation for the things that cannot be put on a list. Sometimes caring for someone isn’t about fixing anything at all. Sometimes the greatest gift we can give someone we love is simply being there.
