My parents moved to Oklahoma Tuesday.  We’d planned to meet for lunch – they would be finished packing, and we (me, husband, and kids) would pass through their town on our way to a vacation.

My mother was completely dithered when we arrived, way behind schedule after running into multiple snags and snafus.  We found her in a hot garage, full of stuff that fit neither in the moving van, nor the storage POD, nor the back of her car.  With twelve hours to go before a firm move-out date.  So… basically the way long-distance moving tends to go.  She was clinging to a brass coat rack, eyes wild,  not entirely unlike a monkey in a palm tree in a hurricane.

My husband spent a few hours rearranging the POD until everything fit. (Most people merely adopted the moving.  But my husband was born into it, molded by it., etc., etc.)  My mom, in-tears grateful, took my husband to pick up an order of victory pizza, leaving me with my father and kids.

My dad seemed bitterly aware that he was of less than no help to my mother, who at sixty five years old, is moving a household alone.   He kept trying to contribute, but his confusion was an impediment.  In the time it took to explain what he needed to do, it was simply easier for someone else to do it.

When she’d left, Dad said, “I’m glad you came.  She’s been down the past few days. This has been a hard move.”

He raises his hands to his chest, indicating himself as the cause.

Routine, pattern, familiarity.  Those are priorities to slow symptoms of dementia.  Moving to a new state, new house, in a different part of the country where no one and nothing is familiar?  Is pretty much setting fire to those priorities.  So much so, that I would reluctantly say perhaps it is even attempting to impregnate priority’s dog as a special level of eff you, dementia slowing tactics.   I know it’s my dad’s wish to make this move, so I don’t say anything.  But all I can see is how it is kicking my dad’s legs out from under him.

“I’m writing about you,” I say.  Because fuck it, right?  I’m crossing the streams.*  Gotta tell him now, while I trust his consent or dissent will be clearheaded and true.  “You can read it, if you want.”

He looks uncomfortable, like I’m asking him to do something fairly unpleasant and extremely boring.  Which, for all he knows (or I know) maybe I am.  He shakes his head.  “No thanks.”

“It’s not bad,” I lie wildly, watching as the scale where Saving My Feelings is slowly but surely outweighed by Not Interested.    My voice goes saccharine-needy.  Hearing it makes me ashamed, but I can’t stop.  I say, “I mean, maybe you won’t  like it.  And if you didn’t, (mumble-mumble something not quite promising I’d take it down in that case, but coming close)  Since it’s about you.”

It’s now clear he wouldn’t read my blog if he was being disemboweled by wolves and I’d written step-by-step instructions on Effective Animal Defense While Reattaching Your Own Spleen.

“The truth is what’s important,” he says, making a gesture that implies, not my feelings, so write.   He frowns, aggravated with me.

It’s what he’s been telling me from the start.  In the strangest twist of fate, he is the most profoundly pro-Anne of anyone in my existence.  Of all the people who love me, he is the sole person who has demanded I say what I think, no matter the content.  Just don’t ask him to read it.

I don’t want to sit in this hot, barren garage, in the presence of my kids, thinking how once again I’ve failed my dad’s primary directive:  Be Who You Are, Not Some Spineless Shadow of What Someone Else Wants You to Be.   I can’t find my spine anywhere, and he always sees it’s so.

“Are you going to miss (Middle’s 1-year-old son)?”  I ask to change the subject.  My dad has helped care for the kid 40 hours a week since the boy was born.

Again, my dad shakes his head in the negative.  “I’m not made that way,” he says.  I see clearly he’s telling the absolute truth.  My kids dance around the garage and my dad leans back and closes his eyes, waiting for my mom to return with pizza.  I don’t know whether to feel good it’s not just me, or sad.  My dad’s not going to miss me either.

* He’s known for a while I keep a blog, but he’s never had an invitation to read it.