I’m being hard on myself (not a new thing!) in the midst of my dad’s illness (a new thing!) and I’ve had enough of myself. That makes sense, right? I’m being hard on myself for being hard on myself. Nod with me, please.

What’s the opposite of self-compassion… self-flagellation?

Maybe I should start a chapter of Self-Flagellators Anonymous? You’re cordially invited (assholes to selves need only attend). Grab a Styrofoam cup of coffee and take a folding seat; this meeting is about to begin.

My name is Jodi and I’m a self-flagellator. I am going to present evidence of my flawed self and then see if I can rationally be okay with myself anyways. Can I stomach myself even when I’m at my worst? Or approaching worst-ness? Hmm. Let’s see how this meeting unfolds. (And then we’ll see how this relates to you.)

Here’s the situation: my dad is 87 and things are, let’s just say, showing their age: his legs, his prostate, his short-term memory, his legs, his prostate, his legs, his prostate (get it? A short-term memory joke? PLEASE LAUGH BECAUSE IF WE DON’T LAUGH WE’LL CRY).

I have swooped in to (remotely) take care of things. It’s 2,469 miles from where I live in California to his new respite care center near Toronto (sorry: 3,973 kilometers), so while I can’t be with him in person as often as I’d like (*there’s the guilt, right on cue*) I can project manage the crap out of things from afar as he transitions from rehab. You can bet he has his Pantene and towels and a new TV and a rented hospital bed and KitKats waiting for him in room 408B. The only thing not there is me.

Okay but wait: I’ve given you the wrong impression. I am painting myself in an all-too-flattering light (like candlelight—universally flattering!) and it’s time to turn on the harsh overhead fluorescents (the ones with the awful cool-toned bulbs). Last week I wrote something sweet about my dad and some of you reached out to say how evident it was that I loved my dad, how I’m basically an angel walking across our planet, how I deserve the Most Excellent Daughter of All Time Award (*bashful turn of head*). Allow me to dispel the illusion, right quick, right here, right now. Yes, I am doing a good job (a solid B+) and yes, I love my dad immensely, but I’ve also left out some unflattering fluorescent truths.

I have been losing my patience, and I’ve been letting it seep out of the container I thought I had sealed tight. My dad is being 87 and I am not being graceful about it.

I’ve never been a mother (other than to cats—I can show you pictures later, like any proud mama would do) but I think this might be like the experience of having kids. My parent friends beat themselves up when they yell at Little Timmy for refusing to wear socks, for example, while I think they’re doing a bang-up job (because I’d be strangling Timmy with said socks. It might be a good thing The Husband and I never had kids). I think parents are allowed to lose their tempers and threaten to put their kids up for adoption, within reason. So maybe I’m giving myself an unwarranted hard time for not being an ideal child to an aging parent who ~of course~ is going to press a few sanity buttons. Maybe I need to cut myself some slack?

Here’s the thing, though: when you’re raising a kid, they aren’t going to die soon.

When you’re interacting with an elderly parent who doesn’t think to use a napkin and spills lunch all over his shirt (and breakfast and dinner and all the snacks too, you betcha), and you maybe snap a bit and then feel like a bag of trash because YOUR DAD IS LIVING ON BORROWED TIME AND HOW HORRIBLE OF A HUMAN ARE YOU TO NOT BE MOTHER FUCKING THERESA WHILE YOU DAB AT THE SOUP DRIPPINGS… it’s hard to like yourself when you’re in the Uber on the way to the airport, resignedly closing your eyes and replaying (re-litigating) the conversations that could’ve gone better if you were better, more patient, less uptight about stupid minestrone stains on a t-shirt.

Want more? Oh I’ve got more. Here’s a sample pack of my un-proud moments:

• The brakes on my dad’s old walker don’t work anymore. The people in rehab said it was unsafe and should “absolutely be thrown out,” and I nodded with them in earnest agreement. We got him a new one—the Cadillac of walkers! And he insists on keeping the old one. WTF, right? “Dad, you can’t keep hoarding things” was my unempathetic, dismissive response to his plea to keep the old jalopy. Okay so the even-more-uncomfortable-truth is that the walker was his mother’s, and he admitted he was being superstitious and sentimental. I’d rather my dad’s room be clutter-free than full of dangerous physical therapy antiques. Ugh, me. (👈How can I go home with that bitch?)
• My dad’s memory has been slipping at an exponential rate, and I haven’t kept pace with the learning curve of how to handle it. “Are they going to drive me to the new place?” he asked me at the start of every phone call for umpteen days in a row. My answer was not a patient and kind, “Yes, dad.” No, I had to embellish it with a classy “Yes, for the tenth time… it’s all looked after!” (My cheeks burn as I type this.) What good did it do to point out it was the tenth (or seven hundredth) time he asked me a question he couldn’t remember the answer to? Was I trying to scold him into having a better memory?
• My dad scored 21 out of 30 on a cognitive test, which he thought was great (“That’s a 70%, Jo!” he beamed.) This came at a time the social worker was recommending he transition to a “home care environment with more support, for his safety,” and I needed all the fodder I could find to convince him it wasn’t safe for him to go home alone. I had to break it to him that he scored zero in a couple of key areas—like the ability to retain new information—which he became defensive about. “That’s not true. I don’t like that being in my file,” was what he said on Tuesday and then he didn’t remember that entire cognitive impairment conversation on Wednesday—which of course was comically ironic. When he denied that his memory was flagging, I might have been a bit too direct when I asked him why he had a catheter (the subject of much daily discussion—details I will mercifully spare you from). He stumbled over a non-answer (which made my heart break into bits), and yet I pounced on it as evidence that he couldn’t possibly go home alone and administer 635 pills a day to himself, let alone get up and pour his Bran Buds for breakfast.
• As I get up to go at the end of my visits, he asks with his eyebrows raised in tentative hope, “When can you come back, Jo?” My heart swells into my throat at these moments. “I don’t know yet dad; I’m going to have to see about my schedule,” I respond with more gruffness than I intend. I feel guilty that I can’t be back for two weeks and so it comes out all warped and distorted as frustration, when I really mean to say that I am so conflicted that I love him and want to be with him but I also live the aforementioned 2,469 miles/ 3,973 kilometers away.
• I have become bizarrely and shamefully intolerant of disability, such that I feel anger and anger’s even angrier cousin—contempt—when I see my dad struggle to do things like shift his position in his bed.“Can’t you just shimmy up a bit,” I ask, as his long legs press into the foot of the hospital bed. I want him to be comfortable so my intentions are good (!) but I quickly lose the will to live. He puts his hands on his bed, presses wanly, and moves CLOSER TO THE FOOT OF THE BED (not really but it seems like it). “Dad, can you push back?!” I urge, and he looks at me forlornly. Any armchair psychologist could diagnose me on the spot: I’m railing against his disability because I am scared and sad and my heart knows in a more intuitive way than my slow brain has caught on that this is The Beginning of the End. His inability to get up means that everything before “The Fall on December 6^th” was literally a Before picture, and the After picture is wayyyyy less desirable. For us both. The Before picture meant that on my visits we’d go to Cora’s for breakfast and then get candy at the Bulk Barn and then watch movies at his place. The After picture involves me trying to turf his old walker on the sly, and an awful lot of talk about bowel movements.
• (Okay this is way less fun than I anticipated, documenting all my lackluster-daughter-moments, so that’s enough for now.) (But I do feel kind of good for confessing these indiscretions to you, like I used to feel as a kid, telling the Priest I was sorry for saying the f word.) (I am no longer sorry for using the f word.)

So now what?

How does one stop the self-flagellation? How does one not feel ashamed of herself… maybe even like herself… possibly even love herself, even when she’s fucking impatient and sad? (Sorry, all that talk about the f word…)

Here’s the litmus test I think about when I’m trying to be charitable to myself: if I was observing a friend interact with her dad in the exact same situation, what would I notice? Would I think she was inappropriate? Evil? Reasonable? “Doing her best”? Would I grant her leeway to have some awesome and loving visits and some that were more fraught with frustration? Would I chastise her? Would I hug her? Would I judge her if she was getting a B+ instead of an A (oh this girl does love an A)? I would feed her a lot of Prosecco, that’s what I’d do.

I guess if I was looking at this “friend” on a surveillance camera visiting her dad, I’d say her love was obvious. I’d see that her frustration was born out of the fact she cared—which was in its essence a good, sweet thing. I’d also admit, after viewing hours of footage and reviewing the transcripts, that she was imperfect (fuck I hate not being perfect, this pisses this perfectionist off to NO END). I’d say she was doing a decent job of answering the same question at 4:10 that her dad asked her at 2:46, in a tone of voice that was only 17% exasperated. I’d say she was thoughtful to be in control freak mode and that she was also absolved for not going back up to Toronto for the weekend to see him because she just needed a quick sec to be with The Husband and The Cat and all the wine. I’d notice she was up at night, thinking about his mail and whether he’d figure out how to use his new TV remote and if they’d be kind to him at his new place, and I’d give her credit for caring, even if she could only talk to her dad for a mere nine minutes the next morning before her meeting.

I’d encourage this friend to put it all in perspective. If her dad was to die tomorrow, would she be fond of their last conversation? Or would her cheeks burn (like mine were when typing all the paragraphs above)? Would she cherish the time spent, the little laughs, the unexpected special moments?

What does this have to do with you?

If you’ve been reading these words (high five to you for sticking it out after 2,175 words!) and feeling a few charitable, un-mean thoughts about me, maybe you could apply those same kind thoughts to yourself, with whatever thing you’re flogging yourself for. Why would you be kind to me, and not to yourself?

Maybe you ask yourself the same question I did… how would you observe a dear friend in your same situation? If your friend parented like you did yesterday, would you be brow-beating her for losing your cool with Little Timmy? If your friend interviewed like you did for that new job yesterday, would you berate her the way you’re berating yourself? If your friend was trying to get fit and slipped and had parmesan truffle fries in a moment of weakness, would you swear at her like you might have sworn to yourself under your truffle-scented breath? You get the point.

While a chunk of this whole “stop being your own worst enemy” is about self-compassion, it’s also about accepting that we can’t be all that we’d like to be, all the time.

I’d like to be Daughter of the Year, but I’d also like to be Wife of the Year and Cat Mom of the Year and Friend of the Year and maybe even exercise a bit (bahaha yeah right) and take a vacation or three and live a little. I can’t possibly be a full-time caregiver to my dad (not that he expects me to be), and I have to accept that I have limits. My love might be unlimited, but my capacity for flying to Toronto every week has some pretty firm edges. I have to accept a B+.

I told you I was a proud mother. Meet Andy. Please notice his tooth.

Where do you need to accept that there are tradeoffs in your life? Maybe you can’t give work your all right now because you have a baby at home who’s a tad bit demanding. Maybe you can’t be at home with your baby every night because your job is a tad bit demanding. Demands! They’re everywhere! We just have to choose what demands feel right for us to spend time and energy on at any given time. And cut ourselves some slack. We’re just so understandably imperfect.

Life’s short. Let’s be kind(er) to ourselves.

This Self-Flagellators Anonymous meeting is now over. Go do whatever you want to do, friend, in a perfectly acceptable B+ way.