My Father’s Active Retirement

In a previous blog, I wrote about a major disadvantage of fulltime homemaking as an occupation: there is no retirement from it. In that blog, I mentioned that my father is retired from being a cab driver. In the years since that retirement, he has never once expressed any guilt feeling about failing to pick up any fares.

By contrast, my mother, a housewife since she married several decades ago, often expresses guilt as well as frustration about not doing enough around their small home. She is elderly and disabled by overweight, arthritis, poor vision, and other health difficulties but steel feels that she ought to be conscientiously performing her household tasks.

I fear that some of my readers may have gotten the idea that I was playing into the popular misperception of the industrious, overburdened woman and the lazy man and using my elderly parents to illustrate this paradigm.

I would like to correct this false idea just in case I gave it to people. My father has never expressed any negative feeling about no longer engaging in paid employment but that doesn’t mean that Dad slobs around all day or spends mot of his time before the TV.

My parents’ home has a small front yard and a very small back yards. As long as I can remember, Dad has always taken care of both the watering and the mowing and he still does. In addition, Dad keeps a little vegetable garden in the backyard in which he is currently growing tomatoes and two varieties of peppers.

Mom started driving when she was 15 years old and drove nearly every day until a few years ago when her vision began failing. Since then, my father and Mom’s younger sister have acted as Mom’s chauffer.

Most of the cooking has always been done by Mom and still is but Dad has taken over the dishwashing. He also sometimes cooks when he only wants a little something for himself. They go out to eat at a restaurant at least once a week and sometimes twice.

There are two vacuums in my parents’ humble abode. The larger one is usually used by Dad because Mom has trouble pushing it around. However, he usually uses it at her suggestion.

As a Mother’s Day present, I once hired the only housekeeping service in their small town to clean up my parents’ place. After the service did its thing, I asked Mom, “How did you like the people I hired?”

“They were OK,” she replied. “But I’d rather ‘hire’ your father.”

Mom has often said, “A man just doesn’t see dirt the way a woman does.” Actually, I think it’s possible that men see it but, like the female writing this blog, are relatively tolerant of dust and debris. I personally dust at about the point at which I’m able to use a finger to write my name in my furniture.

Dad isn’t blind to dust and debris but he lacks my mother’s hatred for it. However, he will often vacuum or perform another similar chore when his ailing wife suggests it. As a young man, he followed the call of his nation to battle Hitler’s army in the bloody fields of Europe. As a doddering but relatively healthy octogenarian, he battles nefarious stray particles under the command of his wife.