Gail asks me where Sammy is. Our dog. He is usually asleep about four feet from her chair.
“He’s right there, honey.”
Two minutes later, she asks again. Then again. Five times in ten minutes on a hard afternoon.
Here is what took me too long to see. Gail is not distressed when she asks. She is not searching the house or calling him at the door. She asks, I answer, she settles. For her, each time is the first time.
I was the one grinding my teeth by the fifth ask.
So whose problem is it?
When a caregiver tells me “she won’t eat,” I slow down and ask one thing before offering a single suggestion. Is she losing weight, or is she eating less than you expect her to eat? Those sound like the same sentence. They are not. One is a medical problem that belongs on her doctor’s desk. The other is the gap between what her body needs now and what I still picture on her plate. Only one of those gets solved with a recipe.
The repeating question was mine. So here is what I actually did about it.
I stopped counting. Keeping a tally in my head was the whole problem. The fifth ask only stung because I was tracking that it was the fifth.
I shortened my answer. “He’s right there.” Three words, same warm tone, every time. No explanation, no reminder that she just asked, no attempt to make the information stick. Long answers were my way of trying to fix her memory, and her memory is not fixable.
And I quit treating her question as an interruption of what I was doing. It was what I was doing. That reframe alone took most of the sting out.
None of that changed Gail. She still asks. The difference is that a question that used to cost me something now costs me almost nothing.
That is the work when the problem turns out to be yours. You are not looking for a way to make the behavior stop. You are looking for a way to make it cheap.
The repetitive question is not hurting Gail. It was wearing me out. Two problems. Two answers. Only one of them was mine to solve, and I solved it by changing me.
Gregg
Get a letter like this every Tuesday.
