Everybody gets a gold star this week. I set limits patiently and kindly, and my parents actually agreed to try having their groceries delivered from Safeway.com. Of course, I still had to do the virtual shopping since my parents never joined the internet age, but it seems to have worked out and could become part of our routine now and then.
Grocery shopping per se has never been a problem for me. Unlike many people, I enjoy going to the store, meandering through random aisles just to see what might turn up. But shopping for other people, especially on a weekly basis, I find far less interesting. In fact, it’s starting to feel like a reverse kind of the hell that parents shopping with toddlers must experience.
“Are you sure you don’t need two rolls of paper towels? Didn’t you run out before? Oh—you want the sugar free, fat-free yogurt, not the low-fat. Gosh, a few extra calories might be a good thing in your case. No? OK. Yes, I already got the box of white zinfandel and the diet 7-Up. But you still need a quart of whole milk and ice cream—and I won’t forget the fat-free cottage cheese this time.”
It’s like shopping for Jack Spratt and his wife. My stepmother regards sugar and fat as hated adversaries (for no good reason; she is not diabetic and weighs less than 90 pounds) while my dad seeks them out: hot chocolate, whole milk and ice cream every day. Both of them could stand to gain a good 10 to 15 pounds, but my nutritional advice falls on deaf ears.
A spirit of rebellion, building toward blind rage, started to rear its head during our weekly trips to the store. This can’t go on, I realized, so I calmly announced that I’m going to need one weekend per month “off,” and added that they’ll have to decide how to get their groceries that week. My stepbrother and his wife are almost never available on weekends, so the remaining options were hiring a helper or trying the delivery service. For now they’ve chosen the latter.
An occasional home care provider could greatly enrich their lives and would give them (and their family members) a measure of freedom and peace of mind. Money on that scale is not an issue to them, but the resistance to “outsiders,” those “people we don’t know” overrides logic.
To a degree, I understand the reluctance to reveal their frailty—let alone their shopping habits—to strangers. But as they acknowledged, I do have a life. And I need to spend more of it outside of supermarkets.
