Life Update

The moves are over, but not really. Every weekend I drive up to my parents house to help with the million projects my Dad has lined up for me. He doesn’t own the place he’s living in, but you would think he did because of the work he’s doing to the place. I don’t know why he sinks his money in to someone else’s investment. By the time he’s finished with the place, it will be completely renovated.

I’m hoping one of these days when I visit my parents that I don’t have to work until i’m exhausted and in pain. It feels like I’m a kid again because from the time I can remember, my father used me, my brother and sister as slaves. He always had bright ideas like planting four acres of tomatoes for us kids to weed, pick, pack and take to the market to sell. I remember spending hours humped over four acres of tomatoes with the skin of my back burning off pulling weeds under the hot sun. Other projects we did were digging holes to put up fences around our seven acre gentleman’s farm. I fed horses, chickens, cats, dogs, two cows and whatever other animals we had. I cleaned up all sorts of animal shit and was throwing bales of hay at age ten. It was exhausting. The only time I got to sleep in was when my father wasn’t around, otherwise I would wake up in the wee hours of the morning with water droplets on my forehead, and if that didn’t work, I got the entire glass of water poured over my head. 

I’m digressing and that’s not good, so I need to fast forward to now.

This past weekend I spent most of my time helping my father re-arrange his bedroom. This sounds like a simple task, but ofcourse it wasn’t because he realized that he no longer wanted one of his dressers, so we had to empty it out, and lug this gigantic dresser down to the first floor and all the way to a dumpster which felt like it was a mile away. This wouldn’t be hard, but my dad is seventy five years old which means I have to do the majority of the work. After the dresser was gone we had to take all of his furniture out of his room and rearrange it. He decided he wanted a new dresser so we drove to a furniture store, loaded up a new dresser and lugged it up to the second floor to his bedroom. The entire process took five hours. Five hours of pain lifting, dragging and lugging furniture up and down steps. I know that sounds easy for some, but when you’re a five foot four inch girl with a hip and back problem, it’s not that easy.

After that, I was tasked with moving all of the computer equipment to a new part of his room. That wasn’t so bad, but then I had to teach Dad how to make phone calls using his new magic jack (LOL) and how to transfer photos from his camera to his computer, then teach him how to e-mail the photos to his friends. 

You would think that was enough work for the day, right? No! This is no ordinary seventy five year old. This man has the energy of a twenty five year old. The next task was for me to paint a rocking chair that was left behind by the old tenants. I started priming the chair with white primer, and all Pop could do was correct me on my painting techniques. With every spray, I heard “No, get it like this… No, do it this way…You’re doing it wrong… Hold it like this…. Do it at an angle…Do you see where the paint is going?….Hold it further away!”… I finally stopped and gave the primer can to him and told him that if he could do it better, then he should do it himself. I know that’s what he wanted. All he had to do was tell me that he wanted to do it and I would have gladly handed over the can to him instead of sitting through ten minutes of being tortured about my painting technique. Ugh!

Later on after painting the chair, I packed up my stuff to return home. I was exhausted, but felt like I got a lot accomplished. I know my parents need my help, but I really want to start spending more fun times with them instead of all this work work work.

As I was leaving my parents house, my Dad called out to me and said something he never said to me before in all my life.  He said “Michelle, I want to thank you for all that you have been doing for me. I really appreciate it.” I was shocked and delighted. It made all of the work totally worth it. Any anger that I was hanging on to went away. 

This was a major breakthrough for my Dad and I’m glad I was there to witness it because this was a total shocker. Let’s hope he keeps up the good work. I know I will.