Yesterday I received a letter from my Grandma. Drew came back from the mailbox with mail and I was tickled pink to have a real letter with my own (new) name on it. Admittedly, this whole deal with receiving letters from Grandma has become a somewhat regular occurrence. Since we moved here I've had more time to do great things like write letters and I've thus she gets more frequent letters from me too. Anyway, it's funny how my Grandma's letters (and writing responses back to her) help me to put things into perspective and to be thankful.
It's easy, sometimes, for Drew and I to get frustrated with his Grandpa and to get into a grumpy mindset about his grumpiness. We sometimes spend hours talking about the day's challenges with Grandpa and trying both to make sense of them and to figure out ways to deal with these challenges in the future. Perhaps this is a sign that it's really hard to live with an 86 year old stroke survivor. It's also possible, on the other hand, that this is a sign we don't have a lot else going on in our lives now (besides my great job and Drew's obsession with college football) thus allowing us to focus on Grandpa's moods and behaviors entirely too much. As these challenges occupy so much of our time and energy, we perhaps unfairly allow them to skew our perspective on the big picture. Just like Grandpa "gripes" about really stupid things because he has nothing better to do, so too, perhaps, do we "gripe" about Grandpa sometimes because we too may be lacking for better things to do.
Writing to my own Grandma, forces me to do something better than just "gripe" because honestly, that doesn't make for much of a letter. As it turns out, writing to Grandma gives me an opportunity to filter through things a little more objectively and re-frame my thoughts. It is important to me to be honest with her and with others about the real difficulties we're encountering in living here. It is also equally important to keep things in perspective and now allow our emotionally charged frustrations skew our own perceived realities of life beyond Grandpa. As a side note, it also just seems wholly unfair to write to one elderly grandparent and complain about another elderly grandparent. That's just too close to nursing home gossip.
So, in my letters to Grandma, I have to find new words apply to my situation here. I write in a way that both discloses my difficulties and fills in the rest of the story with all of the wonderful things that we have to be thankful for. I realized, today, for example, what a gift it is simply to have time to write to Grandma. I know that my letters mean a lot to her and it's a relatively simple way to show love for her, even from a distance. This year I've remembered peoples' birthdays and been able to send specially selected or home-made gifts. I've canned jams, frozen fruit and vegetables to eat through the winter, found local sources for nearly all of our food, tried dozens of new recipes, bakes MANY loaves of bread, started a small flock of chickens (who I love by the way), exercised consistently, felt effective and de-stressed in a job I love, and been a good new little wife to my wonderful husband. This is a HUGE contras to the live I was living a year ago and I should be thankful.
I know that we'll continue to struggle with the challenges of Grandpa's moods and his deteriorating mind but I'm going to really try to pay just as much attention to all the great aspects of life here and now as I do trying to figure out the less pleasant aspects of it.
