Family Ties

Well, hey there, Cadre. Happy, happy Thursday. How are you doing, Jules? Are you still there? I see you joined right before I hit go live if you're still there. Happy, happy Thursday. How you doing? I am coming to you from north of the border today. I am up in Toronto, so it is 05:00 eastern standard time in my world today. Happy caregiver day. If you are not a caregiver in this big, big, wonderful world in which we share, there are over 50 million unpaid caregivers in the, in the United States of America.

Up there's Jules. Nice to see you, Andrea, nice to see you. And even though I am not a full time caregiver of my parents, I am, as the youngest of my siblings, I am, at least in this stage of life, the one who has the opportunity to look after my, my parents, who are still look, looking after themselves in this stage of life. So this is the last live stream of the day on Caregiver day. My name is JC Lippold. If we've never shared space or time together before here in the Cadre sphere, thank you for giving me a few moments to share some space and time with you right here and now.

Whether it's live or whether you're watching this at a later time, it truly is a gift to share some time and space with you. This is family ties, the ties that bind us into the families that we are a part of, whether they are our biological families or our chosen families. The biological family or kind of biological family that I am a part of has some, some adopted and some half siblings. I am the one millennial with six gen x siblings, with a baby boomer mother and a greatest generation father.

Hey, speak wonder. Nice to see you, my friend. If you didn't get a chance to check out speak Wonder's livestream earlier on today, if you have a few minutes today, I encourage you to check out speak wonders livestream. As always, a joy to tune in. But the ties that bind us to the people who we share family with, that is what I jump into the livestream to talk about. So another live stream I would encourage you to check out is a week ago today, Colleen Lindstrom had a live stream that touched me.

And as I was listening, even though I had my live stream for the day all set for last week, Colleen stirred up in me another idea that I will now queue up right now. So recently as I shared, I'm the caretaker for my mom and dad, and even though they're still, in a lot of ways, caretaking themselves in a lot of ways, I am doing a lot for them as they are in their current stage of life. But I, in one stage, I'm preparing them as they learn and grow to kind of take back a lot of their opportunities to do some things in life that maybe their parents and maybe their bosses and other forces in their lives kind of taught them that they weren't supposed to live as fully as maybe they could have.

So one of the things I've been teaching my mom recently is that she can say no to things. This has been a journey over the last couple of months, and you can see me smiling because it's always fun when an older dog can, at least in theory, learn a newer trick. So my mom, in theory, has been learning how to say no to things. And this is where the smile is a little bit of facade, because my mom is really excited that she's learning how to say no. In reality, she's only learning how to say no to one person.

And that person is. Is me, which is great. She's really excited that she's saying no to things, and she's really confident that she's saying no to. She was supposed to go to a concert with me last week sometime, but she was tired and didn't want to go, so she said no. She's actually going to a cabin this weekend with my dad, who also doesn't want to go to the cabin that she also doesn't want to go to. So as I'm the person that she talks to about things, I'm getting to hear how much she doesn't want to go to the cabin tomorrow.

And, you know, it's always the process and the journey to watch people you care about kind of struggle and learn and misstep. But last week, when I was hearing cleen talk about her journey in the caregiver walk so often, the people that we love and that we take care of, the journey of being the caregiver is that we end up being the person that the people that we care about can do things to us so then they can live fuller in other people's existences. I look sometimes at how my mom and my dad can burn off some steam or can practice and exercise some things that maybe they would want to do in some other people's conversations or lives, but they aren't there.

They aren't there yet, or maybe they never will be. And it makes them feel good that they can be there with me. And, you know, I often tie this family ties livestream back to the wonderful creation of situational comedy television. We often watch, you know, 22 minutes episodes of television, and we go, oh, my gosh, this is so funny, because it's so relatable. And, you know, often it's those parents who have the rough edges or the worn off synapses of the brain and the things that they can say and the things that they can do.

And we facepalm but it's true. It is so interesting, the things that our parents can sometimes lay upon us with confidence or joy or honesty, and it may create that little bit of a headache. But how wonderful. May not feel like it sometimes, but how wonderful that they can lay upon us, the things that maybe we, at an earlier stage, could lay upon them. I always love making this point. The things that make family family is that we can be so awful or so mean or so colorful or so humorous or so all of the things with people in our families.

There's something to that. So do you have people in your family who practice the things on you that they would love to be able to be with other people in their lives? Perhaps it's a gift. But also, perhaps you need to bubble wrap yourself sometimes. Perhaps you need to say, hmm, not right now. Do what you need to do. So then you can continue to be the people you need to be for those people. Because guess what? You are not in a situational comedy. Your life is not a 22 minutes episode. You are here for the long haul.

So in those moments that you feel like it's getting a little too real. Yeah. You have the opportunity to step out, to step aside, and you can always walk back in when you're ready. Everybody, it's Thursday. Tomorrow is Friday. You are where you are. Those are always good things to remind yourself. And right now, you're in the Cadre sphere, and you can reenter whenever you need. We are here for you. We'll talk to you later.