Saturday, October 28, 2006
Hear Here Now
I noticed it, definitively, when we watched Akeelah and the Bee a week ago last Thursday. During the movie I prepared and launched dinner. As preparation ended, as is usual, I knelt beside my mother, who was sitting in her rocker, directed her silently to extend her hand toward me and took her blood glucose. As is also usual, as the meter analyzed her blood drop I placed it on the floor in front of me, next to her left foot. All the while Mom was watching the movie, paying no more attention to the process than usual. The meter beeped that it was finished. Mom turned her head toward me and said, "What's my blood sugar tonight?"
"Did you hear the meter, Mom?"
"Well, yes. I always hear it."
Here I have to explain that:
I decided to conduct some experiments after the movie. As we continued our evening, which included much discussion of the movie and the subject of spelling, I deliberately dropped the decibel level of my voice to normal. No matter where I stood or sat as we talked, the only time she had difficulty hearing and understanding me was when I was walking away from her and throwing my voice over my shoulder.
I lifted an internal chorus of Hallelujah! to the skies.
Just in the last week-plus-some, it's made a welcome difference in my physical comfort level around here. Except. Except.
Within the last few-days-less-than-a-week I've been forced to take acute notice that some of my mother's "hearing problem" has been a listening problem. A fair amount of time when she doesn't "hear" me, she isn't listening. This isn't news to me, but it's become much more apparent, now that I've lowered the level of my voice.
This is a decades old problem. I've had it with not only her but other members of my family. It's directly related to the fact that I am what is labeled a "know it all". Not that I do know it all, or ever have, or ever thought I have, or ever let on that I do. It's just that I have always been fascinated with information and will spontaneously spout bits of it when those bits seem appropriate to the conversation at hand. Sometimes these are gathered bits. Sometimes they are self-generated bits, fashioned from thinking about and playing match games with all the bits already in my head. I usually distinguish one type from another; sometimes, though, I have to be prodded to do this by someone asking, "How do you know thus and so?" Rarely, as a broad joke, I'll throw out mangled information. As an adult among adults, this is usually acknowledged for what it is. I used to do it as a child, though, too, among other children, primarily my younger sisters. Sometimes, these younger children took the joke as fact. One such "fact" has never been forgotten by one of my sisters. Another "fact", which I learned from someone else, believed for years and turned out not to be true also held a sister captive for about the same length of time it held me captive. As well, I have always been repetitive; probably because I have memories of realizing, from a very young age, that no one was listening to me most of the time, which I always thought was odd, since I spent so much time alone or in solitary pursuits when forced with accompaniment that I didn't think I talked that much.
So, anyway, the family habit of not listening to me has a long history; particularly long in my mother's case. In some cases it is justified; when I am repetitive, for instance, or when I am slyly playing with my bits and in full view of a public, mixed audience. In some cases, well, it's sad that it happens, but it hasn't been justified.
So, with all this in mind, since I seemed to have solved the voice volume problem to my mother's and my satisfaction, I recently set about considering the listening problem. I realized that some of what she doesn't listen to are daily, incessant repetitions:
When I'm just talking to her, though, when we're carrying on a conversation, it is not uncommon for me to open my mouth and before I've made a sound her eyes are scrinched, she's straining toward me and saying, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you." Thus, I find myself turning up my voice until there is no way she can't "understand" me.
Ironically, I was the one who taught her how to say this to people when her hearing (and her alertness, I now realize) were much worse. She used to pretend she heard people, smile, nod and often miss out on important or interesting information or the pleasure of a shared connection. Now, the lesson is coming back to bite me in the ass.
Early Friday morning I decided that the best way to deal with this was head on. During breakfast, after she'd read through the paper to her satisfaction, I kept her at the table and initiated The Listening Conversation. I hit her head on with the fact that she is in the habit of not listening to me and I know it's not because of her hearing. I approached this by explaining what I'd been doing with volume levels over the past week. The timing and area of the conversation were both attempts to sneak up on her. It worked. She listened.
She tilted her face coyly away from me and flashed me a thin-lipped grin. "Most of what you say I hear over and over every day."
"I know," I said. "I know that's a problem. Some of those reminders I can vary. Some I can't, and I can live with you tuning those out. I am not, however, interested in doing any more talking during a particular day than I have to do. So, I want you to know ahead of time that when we are just conversing about things, you are in a physical position to hear everything I say and there are no cross currents of sound or air distorting my voice, if you don't hear something I say the first time, I'm not going to repeat it. I'm tired of repeating myself. I'm tired of ramping up my voice just because you're not listening. I'm tired of rumbling myself from the inside out because you're not listening. You have the ability to listen. You are very good about letting people know when you don't understand something, so that's not a problem. I'm not expecting you to remember stuff, I'm not blaming you for your dementia. But, I'm not going to take responsibility, any longer, for any lazy listening on your part, and, believe me, I can tell the difference in you between lazy listening and a failure of brain power."
So, it's been almost 48 hours since that conversation. There have been several times through yesterday and today when we've been in conversation, face to face, without sound distortions, and she's fallen into her lazy listening habit; thus, there have been several times when I haven't repeated things I've said. These incidents are decreasing, but yesterday she went to bed thoroughly grim, feeling, I'm sure, that I'd spent much of the day shutting her out. Today, though, she listened more carefully and heard about half again more of what I said; thus, the day was much easier for her and she retired in her usual good humor.
Interestingly, as she was sitting on her bed blowing her nose in preparation for the oxygen cannula, she referred to a conversation we'd had earlier catalyzed by watching the movie Shakespeare in Love.
"I'm still wondering about the end of the movie," she said, "where the girl is walking across the beach."
"I explained that to you at the time; where that came from, what play it's referring to."
"Oh, yes, I remember. I guess I wasn't listening."
I almost fell over from the weight of her words. "See, Mom," I taunted her, "you admit it. You weren't listening."
She turned that thin-lipped I've-been-caught grin on me again. "I know. What about the girl on the beach?"
"I'll tell you what. The next time we watch that movie and you ask me that question, I'll answer it again. When I do, you'd better be listening."
"I guess I'd better," she said. "How about if we watch it tomorrow?"
How about that!
Today, too, while doing chores, doing an errand, I've been reflecting on how peaceful it feels to not be continually vibrating raucously from the sound of my voice. It took only a day for this to have a felicitous effect. I've often considered that one of the things I might do immediately after my mother dies is set up a situation where I can go into enforced seclusion for a few months, maybe six, maybe more, in which I "take a vow of silence", as the monks would say. I remember explaining this desire a couple of years ago to one of my sisters as a period in which I could, "make sense of the totality of what I will have been doing here."
When I think back on my announcement, I find it amusingly absurd that it was the sister who is the most relentlessly social to whom I spoke of this; she was confused, horrified and, which came as the ultimate surprise to me, a little chastened. I think she took my announcement as a personal rejection. Not that she needed to; I think it was simply that it is not her nature to consider seclusion as socially useful; thus, her immediate response to my announcement was that I was somehow rejecting her and my other sisters. I was so surprised by her reaction, though, that I didn't think to respond reassuringly; I left her to contemplate it on her own. I have no idea what the upshot of that contemplation might be.
At any rate, at the time of my announcement, I was sure of my motives. Now, I think, I think I've achieved a bit more clarity about why I consider this kind of a retreat immediately after my mother dies.. These years of being my mother's companion have, of necessity, turned me into a much, much more talkative person than I've ever been, simply because there is someone around with whom I must talk. Previously, although I'm neither shy nor socially withdrawn, thus, when in public I am more apt to talk than not, I purposely spent lots of time alone, primarily because I have, all my adult life, insisted on living alone; thus, I was able to get away with scraping together enough silence to keep me happy. Not so, as my mother's companion.
Although I expect my new efforts at lowering decibel levels will continue to provide great relief, I also expect my desire for intense silence, especially my own, will probably remain with me, so, depending on how circumstances fall into place after my mother's death, I might, indeed, enter into silence for awhile. As I contemplated this yesterday, I realized that I think I may want to enter into a state of not just vocal silence, but communicative silence, as well; primarily, I don't want to write anything down. This would be an extraordinary challenge for me, since it is automatic for my brain to explain things to me lingually, because I'm always considering the possibility of writing down what I'm thinking. As I considered what excluding the tool of writing from me would do I further realized that in order to head off any possibility of me storing lingualized bits in my brain which I would rush to write once I'd finished my enforced silence, I would also have to take a vow that I would not write about my experience of silence. Ever. This would free my brain from the necessity of attempting to lingualize everything it thought. Wow, I thought. If I could set myself to this discipline, I might discover, for myself, a whole new way of thinking! I might even be able to free myself from some strictures of thought that seem inherent but are merely habitual! This must be what very deep meditation is!
So, while I must, I'll surrender to internal sound. Now that I've figured out that I can modify the volume, it's no longer threatening to approach the level of self-torture. I've noticed, in fact, that I am hearing indigenous environmental sound better than I did prior to Friday, and, you know, my hearing is important to me. It's so important to me that if someone told me that I must sacrifice either sight or sound, my choice, but I couldn't have both, I'd gladly hand over my eyes.
When I can, though, I'll, one way or another, pursue silence. Now that I feel this is certain, my external and internal ears are so savoring the possibility of a future period of silence that it feels as though they are shivering with the desire to lap up every possible sound I can create between now and the moment I am free to step over the threshhold into A Grand Silence.
Seems so appropriate: This noisy, companionship (including the internal noise of reporting on the companionship) discipline...followed by the discipline of pursuing deep internal silence.
Music to my ears.
Later.
"Did you hear the meter, Mom?"
"Well, yes. I always hear it."
Here I have to explain that:
- This new meter has a softer beep by about half as our old meter. We've had the new meter since March of this year.
- She rarely heard the old meter.
- I've known, for some months, that she can hear this new meter in her bathroom, which is well constructed for the production of sound. She has also, but only a couple of times, indicated that she's heard the meter in the morning when it's on her bed very close to her ear.
- I did not know that she's been able to hear the meter anywhere else.
- I have noticed, though, since April, that her hearing has "gotten better", as she tells it; thus, she's noticed it, too. I think this improvement has everything to do with the fact that she is more alert, now that her anemia is under excellent control. Even when she's feeling a little low physically, her level of alertness remains practically steady; thus, she is almost always paying attention to her environment. Consequently, in the last several months I've been able to lower the volume of the TV (thank the gods) when she's watching it.
I decided to conduct some experiments after the movie. As we continued our evening, which included much discussion of the movie and the subject of spelling, I deliberately dropped the decibel level of my voice to normal. No matter where I stood or sat as we talked, the only time she had difficulty hearing and understanding me was when I was walking away from her and throwing my voice over my shoulder.
I lifted an internal chorus of Hallelujah! to the skies.
Just in the last week-plus-some, it's made a welcome difference in my physical comfort level around here. Except. Except.
Within the last few-days-less-than-a-week I've been forced to take acute notice that some of my mother's "hearing problem" has been a listening problem. A fair amount of time when she doesn't "hear" me, she isn't listening. This isn't news to me, but it's become much more apparent, now that I've lowered the level of my voice.
This is a decades old problem. I've had it with not only her but other members of my family. It's directly related to the fact that I am what is labeled a "know it all". Not that I do know it all, or ever have, or ever thought I have, or ever let on that I do. It's just that I have always been fascinated with information and will spontaneously spout bits of it when those bits seem appropriate to the conversation at hand. Sometimes these are gathered bits. Sometimes they are self-generated bits, fashioned from thinking about and playing match games with all the bits already in my head. I usually distinguish one type from another; sometimes, though, I have to be prodded to do this by someone asking, "How do you know thus and so?" Rarely, as a broad joke, I'll throw out mangled information. As an adult among adults, this is usually acknowledged for what it is. I used to do it as a child, though, too, among other children, primarily my younger sisters. Sometimes, these younger children took the joke as fact. One such "fact" has never been forgotten by one of my sisters. Another "fact", which I learned from someone else, believed for years and turned out not to be true also held a sister captive for about the same length of time it held me captive. As well, I have always been repetitive; probably because I have memories of realizing, from a very young age, that no one was listening to me most of the time, which I always thought was odd, since I spent so much time alone or in solitary pursuits when forced with accompaniment that I didn't think I talked that much.
So, anyway, the family habit of not listening to me has a long history; particularly long in my mother's case. In some cases it is justified; when I am repetitive, for instance, or when I am slyly playing with my bits and in full view of a public, mixed audience. In some cases, well, it's sad that it happens, but it hasn't been justified.
So, with all this in mind, since I seemed to have solved the voice volume problem to my mother's and my satisfaction, I recently set about considering the listening problem. I realized that some of what she doesn't listen to are daily, incessant repetitions:
- "Drink more coffee/tea/OJ/water/V-8 juice. Now."
- "Blow your nose."
- "Time to go to the bathroom."
- "Lift your leg from the thigh. No. From the thigh."
- "Watch your OJ, don't cover it with the paper, you're about to knock it off the table."
- "Eat over your plate, not over your lap, please."
- "Lead [when negotiating our steps] with your left leg; it's your strongest."
- Many parts of our entire Song of the Washer-ing Women (which I try hard to vary every day, making up little songs on the spot, changing the order of the washing directions, joking gently about all sorts of things connected with requiring help bathing, etc.).
When I'm just talking to her, though, when we're carrying on a conversation, it is not uncommon for me to open my mouth and before I've made a sound her eyes are scrinched, she's straining toward me and saying, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand you." Thus, I find myself turning up my voice until there is no way she can't "understand" me.
Ironically, I was the one who taught her how to say this to people when her hearing (and her alertness, I now realize) were much worse. She used to pretend she heard people, smile, nod and often miss out on important or interesting information or the pleasure of a shared connection. Now, the lesson is coming back to bite me in the ass.
Early Friday morning I decided that the best way to deal with this was head on. During breakfast, after she'd read through the paper to her satisfaction, I kept her at the table and initiated The Listening Conversation. I hit her head on with the fact that she is in the habit of not listening to me and I know it's not because of her hearing. I approached this by explaining what I'd been doing with volume levels over the past week. The timing and area of the conversation were both attempts to sneak up on her. It worked. She listened.
She tilted her face coyly away from me and flashed me a thin-lipped grin. "Most of what you say I hear over and over every day."
"I know," I said. "I know that's a problem. Some of those reminders I can vary. Some I can't, and I can live with you tuning those out. I am not, however, interested in doing any more talking during a particular day than I have to do. So, I want you to know ahead of time that when we are just conversing about things, you are in a physical position to hear everything I say and there are no cross currents of sound or air distorting my voice, if you don't hear something I say the first time, I'm not going to repeat it. I'm tired of repeating myself. I'm tired of ramping up my voice just because you're not listening. I'm tired of rumbling myself from the inside out because you're not listening. You have the ability to listen. You are very good about letting people know when you don't understand something, so that's not a problem. I'm not expecting you to remember stuff, I'm not blaming you for your dementia. But, I'm not going to take responsibility, any longer, for any lazy listening on your part, and, believe me, I can tell the difference in you between lazy listening and a failure of brain power."
So, it's been almost 48 hours since that conversation. There have been several times through yesterday and today when we've been in conversation, face to face, without sound distortions, and she's fallen into her lazy listening habit; thus, there have been several times when I haven't repeated things I've said. These incidents are decreasing, but yesterday she went to bed thoroughly grim, feeling, I'm sure, that I'd spent much of the day shutting her out. Today, though, she listened more carefully and heard about half again more of what I said; thus, the day was much easier for her and she retired in her usual good humor.
Interestingly, as she was sitting on her bed blowing her nose in preparation for the oxygen cannula, she referred to a conversation we'd had earlier catalyzed by watching the movie Shakespeare in Love.
"I'm still wondering about the end of the movie," she said, "where the girl is walking across the beach."
"I explained that to you at the time; where that came from, what play it's referring to."
"Oh, yes, I remember. I guess I wasn't listening."
I almost fell over from the weight of her words. "See, Mom," I taunted her, "you admit it. You weren't listening."
She turned that thin-lipped I've-been-caught grin on me again. "I know. What about the girl on the beach?"
"I'll tell you what. The next time we watch that movie and you ask me that question, I'll answer it again. When I do, you'd better be listening."
"I guess I'd better," she said. "How about if we watch it tomorrow?"
How about that!
Today, too, while doing chores, doing an errand, I've been reflecting on how peaceful it feels to not be continually vibrating raucously from the sound of my voice. It took only a day for this to have a felicitous effect. I've often considered that one of the things I might do immediately after my mother dies is set up a situation where I can go into enforced seclusion for a few months, maybe six, maybe more, in which I "take a vow of silence", as the monks would say. I remember explaining this desire a couple of years ago to one of my sisters as a period in which I could, "make sense of the totality of what I will have been doing here."
When I think back on my announcement, I find it amusingly absurd that it was the sister who is the most relentlessly social to whom I spoke of this; she was confused, horrified and, which came as the ultimate surprise to me, a little chastened. I think she took my announcement as a personal rejection. Not that she needed to; I think it was simply that it is not her nature to consider seclusion as socially useful; thus, her immediate response to my announcement was that I was somehow rejecting her and my other sisters. I was so surprised by her reaction, though, that I didn't think to respond reassuringly; I left her to contemplate it on her own. I have no idea what the upshot of that contemplation might be.
At any rate, at the time of my announcement, I was sure of my motives. Now, I think, I think I've achieved a bit more clarity about why I consider this kind of a retreat immediately after my mother dies.. These years of being my mother's companion have, of necessity, turned me into a much, much more talkative person than I've ever been, simply because there is someone around with whom I must talk. Previously, although I'm neither shy nor socially withdrawn, thus, when in public I am more apt to talk than not, I purposely spent lots of time alone, primarily because I have, all my adult life, insisted on living alone; thus, I was able to get away with scraping together enough silence to keep me happy. Not so, as my mother's companion.
Although I expect my new efforts at lowering decibel levels will continue to provide great relief, I also expect my desire for intense silence, especially my own, will probably remain with me, so, depending on how circumstances fall into place after my mother's death, I might, indeed, enter into silence for awhile. As I contemplated this yesterday, I realized that I think I may want to enter into a state of not just vocal silence, but communicative silence, as well; primarily, I don't want to write anything down. This would be an extraordinary challenge for me, since it is automatic for my brain to explain things to me lingually, because I'm always considering the possibility of writing down what I'm thinking. As I considered what excluding the tool of writing from me would do I further realized that in order to head off any possibility of me storing lingualized bits in my brain which I would rush to write once I'd finished my enforced silence, I would also have to take a vow that I would not write about my experience of silence. Ever. This would free my brain from the necessity of attempting to lingualize everything it thought. Wow, I thought. If I could set myself to this discipline, I might discover, for myself, a whole new way of thinking! I might even be able to free myself from some strictures of thought that seem inherent but are merely habitual! This must be what very deep meditation is!
So, while I must, I'll surrender to internal sound. Now that I've figured out that I can modify the volume, it's no longer threatening to approach the level of self-torture. I've noticed, in fact, that I am hearing indigenous environmental sound better than I did prior to Friday, and, you know, my hearing is important to me. It's so important to me that if someone told me that I must sacrifice either sight or sound, my choice, but I couldn't have both, I'd gladly hand over my eyes.
When I can, though, I'll, one way or another, pursue silence. Now that I feel this is certain, my external and internal ears are so savoring the possibility of a future period of silence that it feels as though they are shivering with the desire to lap up every possible sound I can create between now and the moment I am free to step over the threshhold into A Grand Silence.
Seems so appropriate: This noisy, companionship (including the internal noise of reporting on the companionship) discipline...followed by the discipline of pursuing deep internal silence.
Music to my ears.
Later.
Comments:
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Originally posted by Mona Johnson: Sun Oct 29, 12:38:00 PM 2006
Gail,
I think feeling that people are not listening to you is at least as damaging as noise you can't control. I would bet that a lot of caregivers aren't listened to - by the people they're caring for, by doctors, and sometimes by the world at large.
Are caregivers as invisible as the people they care for?
Originally posted by Anonymous: Sun Oct 29, 02:03:00 PM 2006
I am also considered to be a know it all by my family, and they do tend to not hear what I'm saying in a completely unrelated way to any issues with hearing. Also, Mom has a hard time processing information sometimes, so I notice that I have to repeat things often to her. It is hard to not get frustrated...more so with the rest of my family who doesn't have an excuse for not hearing me. Well, Gail, we hear you.
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Gail,
I think feeling that people are not listening to you is at least as damaging as noise you can't control. I would bet that a lot of caregivers aren't listened to - by the people they're caring for, by doctors, and sometimes by the world at large.
Are caregivers as invisible as the people they care for?
Originally posted by Anonymous: Sun Oct 29, 02:03:00 PM 2006
I am also considered to be a know it all by my family, and they do tend to not hear what I'm saying in a completely unrelated way to any issues with hearing. Also, Mom has a hard time processing information sometimes, so I notice that I have to repeat things often to her. It is hard to not get frustrated...more so with the rest of my family who doesn't have an excuse for not hearing me. Well, Gail, we hear you.
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