Elder care

I have spent so many years of my life studying topics....topics like work life balance, elder care, performance management. In grad school, I could zip through the articles, make a few highlights, remember the authors names and the exact findings disclosed in the two column results section. It all seemed so cut and dry back then. Words on the paper, research in a scholarly journal. There were no faces to the case studies. For whatever reason, it never really occurred to me that one day, these journal articles would be my life.

Well here I am. Struggling daily with work life balance. I have little of it. I work a lot. Even when I am not at work, I work. I find I wake up even dreaming about work lately. All the more unusual since I've never been one to remember my dreams at all and to now not only remember them but to recall they are all work related is a bit frightening to me. My red badge of courage in my mind was always my work ethic and the more I worked, the harder I worked, the better person I could prove I was. I am trying diligently to break the cycle in my head and recognize I might be the better person for leaving at 5pm some evening and going home to walk in the park and just enjoy my own thoughts.

And tonight, I did just that. Left work early and took care of me. What a great relief and then I heard from my parents that grandpa is again in the hospital. Suddenly the elder care issues that never really crossed my mind nor faced my family are front and center. Grandpa had a knee replacement early this year and it went from bad to worse very quickly. He now has been in and out of the hospital multiple times per week and is facing leg amputation if the current treatment plan does not play out as hoped. Scary! Here's a healthy mid 80s man whose life is suddenly upside down and his mobility has been stolen. And, here is the family dealing with those elder care issues that seemed so distant from mind for all those years I read the articles and thought about corporate programs that could help with the issues their employees faced. I recognize now it isn't a corporate program to fix this--it's real people, real lives and sometimes real scary. We have to deal with the emotional aspect of all of this and recognize the toll it takes on each family member. I never read that in a journal article.

I guess the real lesson learned is that education doesn't always come from an article--it might just come from life around you.