Buttering His Bread

Hard Boundaries, Tender Restraint

Photo by Alina Bordunova on Unsplash

“Carolyn, you need to butter his bread,” my mom implored as she cooked us breakfast at her house. To her, it was an emergency. You would have thought the man was moments from starvation rather than sitting at the kitchen table with two functioning hands.

Although mom was an ambitious career woman who climbed the ladder from LPN to Nurse Practitioner, she was very much a traditionalist on the home front. At home, she believed that men were the de facto head of the household, and they should be waited on hand and foot by their women. This was part of her 1950s housewife conditioning.

Men were served meals first. Always, and I mean always. It didn’t matter that my sister squeezed a watermelon out of a keyhole while giving birth. My mom served my sister’s husband first when they came home from the hospital. Men were first. Period. End of story. No exceptions. Not even giving birth warranted being served first.

I rolled my eyes inwardly at my mom’s absurd statement to butter my partner’s bread. I walked away from where she was cooking at the stove, and thought to myself,

“He’s a grown-ass man. I most certainly will not be buttering his bread.”

Then I sat down and ate my own food.

Of course, if my partner was still recovering from his stroke, I would definitely have helped him with his food. But it had been a decade since his recovery, and he was perfectly capable of cutting up his food and buttering toast.

Fast forward to the present day. Twenty years have passed since his stroke and at least ten years since my mom’s kitchen mandate. My partner is now much older and more frail. He is in cognitive decline and walks around with a cane. Recently we ate at our local diner for lunch.

His hands shook as he struggled to open the syrup packets to put on his French toast. A part of me wanted to rush in and help, but I resisted and watched him fumble, sad to see him in this state.

At this moment, I remembered the dementia symposium I attended in April. The Keynote Speaker, a professor from Kentucky, talked about how we caregivers may be tempted to jump in and help our loved ones with various tasks because we can do things more efficiently and faster. But she recommended that we wait until they ask us for help. This is to preserve their dignity. On some level, they know they are failing, and jumping in to help them makes them feel useless.

Listening to her, I recalled the many times I jumped in and finished a task because it was just easier to do so. So I’m training myself to not jump in when he does things imperfectly.

At the diner I stifled my urge to help my partner and waited for him to ask. Eventually, he did ask, and I helped him open three syrup packets by bending back the corners so he could peel it back and pour the sauce onto the toast.

But even I had trouble opening the butter packet. So, we both stabbed the container with a knife until we wrestled the butter free from its plastic prison.

At home, he is in charge of the laundry. It takes him hours to do the laundry and sometimes he messes things up, but I don’t intervene. He needs to do something, and as long as he can do it, I will let him. If there is an item of clothing that is especially precious to me, I will wash it myself so as not to risk him ruining it. He folds things imperfectly, but I don’t point it out.

I just let him hang things haphazardly and then fix things later.

Years ago, my mom wanted me to butter his bread before he asked.

These days, I help when asked.

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