I'm Christy Diane Farr, and I work with unconventional humans navigating the complicated, beautiful, exhausting work of being alive. I wrote this piece five years ago, and it still feels as relevant today as it did then.
Productivity has shifted throughout my life from an unattainable fantasy goal in my teens and twenties to survival at the crossroads of motherhood and self-employment in my thirties. At 40, it shifted again because the kids had grown up, and all I had to do was run a business and maintain my relationships, health, and home. It took some time, but year or so, I was finally actually getting massive amounts of tasks and projects done. I’m realizing that productivity is shifting again.
One evening, The Beautiful One was at work, and I had a long to-do list to keep me busy. I started with a few administrative items, and Cooper (the older of our two standard poodles) kept interrupting me. Instead of trying to distract him, I closed the laptop and took him and Summitt for a walk. Upon our return, it was supper time and instead of throwing food in just his bowl and returning to work, I made myself a chicken quesadilla. Finally, I sat back down to work and glanced at my notebook where the words "CALL DAD" jumped off the page. It's in all caps because this is the third week it's been on my list.
My dad and I have a system. We call on Sundays. It's been that way since I was a child — only then he called every other Sunday without fail, and now more weeks pass between our calls, which are initiated by either of us instead of just him.
This Sunday calls thing is an old, very serious system.
He called me once on a Wednesday, and I knew before I answered the phone that my grandmother had finally succumbed to — been freed from — Alzheimer's. He called me once on a Tuesday, and since I wasn't expecting anyone to die, I froze with the phone in my hand. The Beautiful One gently asked if I would answer. I said, "But it's Tuesday." She reassured me it was okay and that I should go ahead and answer. It was my dad calling to tell me he'd had a "heart incident" the weekend before. Heart incident is apparently stubborn old man talk for: I was having chest pain off and on for weeks and it got pretty intense so I drove myself to the hospital and they sent me by ambulance to another hospital where I had triple bypass surgery and now I'm safe and recovering at home.
As you can imagine, our 40+ year history of Sunday calls has established a strong preference for them, but because the next Sunday was seven days away and because Sundays seem to be slipping through my fingers, I put off work a bit longer and called my dad on Monday night. We shared a laugh about how we'd both been meaning to call for three weeks, but Sundays just kept getting away from us.
The call was fairly normal — the been-meaning-to-call exchange and laughter, the requisite weather exchange, yard work updates, vaccines all done. He told me his dog got attacked by the neighbor's dog again (recovering well) and that he's in an epic battle with a vole who developed an advanced network of tunnels from a nearby waterway into his yard. I told him about the two concrete repairs I did in the basement. He's proud. He asked how my mom was doing since her stroke and vascular dementia diagnosis, and listened carefully — with the support of his voice-to-text phone for hard-of-hearing folks — to the story of my mom and me talking about how she won't be driving anymore. Dad said he was so sorry to hear that about her giving up the car. He added, "Please give her my love," which completely wrecked me. They've been divorced for 43 years.
I asked my dad how he was feeling and he said, "Great in my body... but I can't remember shit these days."
Although his wife told me a year ago that he was experiencing noticeable memory loss, she asked me not to talk to him about it until he brought it up. And there it was. He finally told me that he, too, is losing his mind. We talked about meds and how they didn't seem to help my mom's two sisters, who already died from Alzheimer's, nor the one remaining sister who is living with it.
I said, "I'm sorry to hear about your memory, Dad." He said, "Me too. Getting old sucks."
He always says that getting old sucks. If our family legacy of memory loss comes for me, I'm going to agree with him — but right now, I fucking love getting older. I love that I know calling him is more important than marketing my business, that walking my dog and feeding myself supper is more important than following up with that potential new client, that writing this down is more important than whatever else I meant to do last night.
My productivity is shifting. Maybe it'll all get done, maybe it won't — but I'm learning what to put first so what's left undone doesn't break my fucking heart.
If any of this is weighing on you right now — the weight of aging parents, the impossible to-do list, the question of what actually matters — that's exactly the kind of thing we work through together in private sessions. You can learn more here or just reach out directly.
Christy Diane Farr is the founder of The Unruly Woman and Unruly Spaces. She works with unconventional folks healing their relationships with home, with themselves, and with the lives they're actually living.
