The Vine: November 18, 2009
What’s the proper construction for the possessive form of a noun phrase such as “commander-in-chief”? I know the plural is “commanders-in-chief,” but is the plural possessive then “commanders’-in-chief”? “Or commanders-in-chief’s”? That doesn’t look right…
This question comes from a friend, and I’ve already recommended he just stay away from the apostrophe-S construction and go with a prepositional phrase instead (“belonging to the commanders-in-chief” or something to that effect). But now the plural possessive construction question is annoying me.
Thanks much!
LJB
Dear LJB,
“Commanders in chief’s” looks wrong to me too, but the documentation I could find online says that’s the correct construction.
It’s less inelegant than the alternatives, I guess.
Sarah,
I have a roommate problem I’m hoping you can help me resolve. Two months ago, I moved into a house where a married couple and a young man were already living. We all get along really well; they give me space, we chat when we run into each other.
The problem: the man-half of the couple (let’s call him P) doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of lifting the seat. I share a bathroom with the couple, and the other guy (D) lives in the attic apartment and has his own bathroom. Soon after moving in, the wife of the couple warned me that D sometimes uses our bathroom, and “makes a mess,” so if I see him coming out could I please remind him to use his own bathroom instead. As a result of this conversation, for weeks when I had to wipe the seat down before I used it I was mentally blaming D, though I only saw him come out of our bathroom once.
At some point I realized that it must be P who is to blame because it happens all the time when P and I are the only ones home. Once, P also implicated D as the culprit when he saw me come out of the bathroom looking disgusted.
I’ve been quietly dealing with this, seething inside while I wipe the seat, but it’s gotten to the point that when I’m out in public I’ll look for a bathroom to use before I go home. I’m a bit of a germophobe, so that’s a big deal for me. Plus, I’m the one who buys the toilet paper and, having to clean up after P, I go through at least three times as much as I should. The other day there was urine ON THE HANDLE. I don’t even know how that would happen, and now I’m paranoid about touching anything in the bathroom with my bare hands.
Having learned from past Vine responses, normally I would just address a roommate problem head-on and talk to the culprit. There are a few factors that have prevented me from doing that this time. There is a significant language barrier between me and P that makes even mundane conversations pretty awkward and unclear. I have to ask him to repeat himself several times, and usually walk away unsure if I understood the conversation at all.
I’m also nervous that I’d overstep cultural boundaries stricter than those I’m used to. For example, he’s told me in the past that in his country of origin, men and women never touch each other unless they’re married. I’m worried about offending him and making the living situation difficult.
I don’t want to leave; I really like these people, the rent is ridiculously cheap, and I don’t think I can deal with the process of moving again so soon.
I’m hoping there’s some solution I just don’t see. Would it be completely out of line to try to talk to P’s wife? I can’t understand how the pee isn’t a problem for her as well, unless she continues to think it’s all D’s fault. Is there a way to bring up the topic with P without accusing him of being the culprit? I know it’s wrong to continue to blame D for this, but I was thinking of saying something like, “Hey, P, have you noticed D using our bathroom a lot lately? Because there’s pretty much always a mess in there.” I’m trying to find a subtle but not passive-aggressive way to address this delicate situation.
Hope you can help,
Peeved
Dear Pee(ved),
Take P (…hee) aside and tell him that you have a house matter to discuss with him involving the bathroom.You apologize if this makes him uncomfortable, and you don’t wish to accuse him of anything, but the problem is one that usually attends male urination, not female, which is why you have addressed this with him — and will address it with D.
Explain as directly and briefly as you can that not all the urine is going where it belongs.Add that you worry about hygiene and germs, and don’t wish to clean up the excretions of others.You can’t imagine that it’s on purpose, of course, but now that he’s aware, you really need him to leave the bathroom in the same condition in which he found it.
The reason for the long and formal lead-up is so that you can read his body language or any other reactions, and if it seems to you as though he’s either not understanding what you mean, or has become deeply uncomfortable with the topic, you can interrupt yourself and ask if you should address the problem at a house meeting instead.My feeling is that, if it’s culturally permissible for him to share a bathroom and other living space with a woman not his wife, then it’s also doable for him to have a five-minute conversation about basic bathroom courtesy without fainting.
Do address it with D as well, but P is a big boy and can handle the conversation, and so can you.Keep an even tone, thank him for his time, and if things don’t improve, mention it to his wife — but she’s not responsible, probably, so for now, leave her out of it.
Hi Sars,
My mother was recently diagnosed with a particularly awful form of cancer. On the bright side, the doctors caught it very early, and my mother was otherwise healthy, and so they were feeling pretty good about her prognosis. She had surgery shortly after the diagnosis, and in follow-up visits, her surgeon said that her recovery was remarkable (that if he had not performed the operation himself, he wouldn’t have known that she just underwent a major procedure). In short, it was very, very scary, but there was a lot of hope.
But now she is consulting with her chemotherapy doctors, and they aren’t as optimistic as the surgeon. I’ve never known anyone else with cancer before, so I don’t have any comparisons to the treatment of other, less-deadly forms of cancer. She is looking at six months of chemotherapy (which seems like a lot to me, but again, I don’t know), followed up with some radiation.
Originally, the doctors indicated that she wouldn’t lose her hair, due to the type of cancer she has and the advancements in chemotherapy over the past few years. I think my family held onto that info as proof that she would be okay, as long as she doesn’t lose her hair.
Today we found out that she would, and even though hair is not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, I am just devastated over the news. I am scared to see my mom go through this as it is, but I guess I felt like if she looked like herself, she couldn’t be that sick.
When we first got her diagnosis, I couldn’t stop shaking for days (teeth chattering and all) and now I’ve spent all day on the verge of tears. I feel so helpless. I think the only thing that will make me feel better right now is an action plan of some sort, which brings me to my question.
What can I do to help her?
Background information — my family is extremely close, but my parents also do the withholding-information-to-protect-the-kids thing, despite the fact that we are all in our twenties. I live just 15 minutes away from my mom, and my sister lives about 30 minutes away, so we spend a lot of time together as a family (I’m going to amend my “extremely close” to “freakishly close” — we all talk nearly every day).
My mom is the uber-homemaker, the caretaker, so you can image the role of the “taken care of” doesn’t sit well with her. When she was in the hospital with her surgery, she didn’t really want us visiting her — she didn’t like us seeing her sick, and didn’t want us feeling like we had to spend the evening at the hospital with her after working all day (this is the kind of woman I’m dealing with here — downplaying an extended stay in the hospital so everyone could continue their lives uninterrupted. I never realized how WASPy my family was until now!).
So I am just at a loss for how to make her feel better, or as best as one can feel when one is having poison pumped into them regularly. How can we take care of the person who usually takes care of everyone else, and who doesn’t like to show weakness?
Any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated — activities, books, mantras, ANYTHING to help my family get through this.
Trying To Be The Best Daughter I Can Be
Dear Best,
I’m so sorry for your troubles.
The day after I had a melanoma removed, to the tune of 55 stitches in my back, I worked.I’d had to sleep sitting up and slung over at a weird angle, and I couldn’t really sit in a chair properly, but I worked, because if I could work, then I was fine.
And I was fine, as it turned out, but even if I hadn’t been, I would still have worked that day, and every day after that for as long as I could; this is how some people are.The prospect of your mother’s hair loss will probably force her, as it’s likely forcing everyone else, to confront Not Fine, but if her normal routine is to take care of everyone and not need help…I mean, it kind of doesn’t matter what exactly her normal routine is, as much as that she can still do parts of it, and feel like her life isn’t an occupied city.Denial on that point is not always a bad thing, mentally.
Yes, she needs to take care of herself, but for her, that’s what taking care of herself looks like.Physically, sure, she needs to go a little easier and not push too hard, but emotionally, if she wants to get up and handle some shit, that’s good — for her.
So what you can do to take care of her specifically is to listen, respect what she’s telling you, respect what she’s not telling you, and just be there.Offer your help, but if it’s not accepted, drop it.Make a casserole or clean the house here and there, but if you sense it’s annoying her, stop.She doesn’t want you to mother her; she doesn’t want that to be necessary.Nobody does.Just spend time with her and support her.
I’ve seen the other side of it too — my father and I spent the day of my mother’s surgery obsessing over insignificant scheduling and projects so that we would have something to do that we could control.And let me tell you: OBSESSING.We spent, no kidding, 20 minutes discussing where to go for lunch in town, when to leave, how to walk there, wouldn’t it be better to walk this other way, would it take longer coming back since it’s all uphill, how much longer — I mean, ridonk.Then we rearranged the furniture in her room like six times, “because then if she wants to swing the table over to the” OH MY GOD NO ONE CARES.But we could control exactly nothing in the situation except that little crap, so we controlled the shit out of it.
My point in telling you this is to suggest that, when you’re asking me and the readers for things to do for your mother, what you’re doing at the same time is asking for things to do, period, that give you a sense of purpose and usefulness in the situation.I say this without disrespect or judgment, as someone who moved a very heavy hospital Barcalounger twice in order to delay dealing with certain realities like chest tubes; this is normal and appropriate, to feel that if you do enough small things, you will get credit on the big thing.
But you have to acknowledge this, that some of it is about your own fears and feelings (and that’s okay), and at some point, you should just tell your mother, “I feel very powerless over this situation, and I would appreciate it if I could feel helpful in a small way.Please find some busywork that we can do in front of the TV together.”And, you know, she knows it’s weird for you too.Part of me thinks my mother told me and Dad separately to be in charge of each other because she knew we needed to be in charge of something.No way did she need those flowers moved around ten times for real.
It’s hard, what your family is going through.It’s hard for everyone individually, and in trying to get each other through it, too.You may feel guilty for freaking out when it’s not you who has the cancer, but you shouldn’t; it’s normal, and if you let your mother be who she is, but also tell her how it is for who you are, it’ll be fine.
Good health to you both.
Tags: grammar roommates the fam
Every family has its odd coping mechanisms. My sisters and I write lists. When my dad passed away recently, every discussion included “Wait, let me get the notebook!” We had a master list of things to be done, and sublists for everything from the Target run to what we needed to take to the funeral home. It drives our husbands nuts, but we were able to offload a lot of anxiety into those lists.
As for Best, we found when my sister had cancer that letting her decide which projects were important worked best for the most part, but every now and then just saying “How about I run downstairs and take care of that laundry” went over well. Then again, we’re the sort of family that comes to visit and does projects at your house. YMMV
@ Best, I’m so sorry. One of my dearest friends was diagnosed with leukemia last July, given the all-clear in November, and diagnosed with multiple myeloma in January. There are concrete things to do, but everything I got out of the cancer pretty much boiled down to: lead with your heart, and love without fear.
The coming months are going to be tough, and it’s going to hurt, and it’s going to be scary. A lot.
Let it. And cut yourself some slack for letting it.
Although I would give anything in the world to have my friend back, it wasn’t entirely awful. Parts of the experience were quite beautiful. We grew closer in eight months of cancer than we had in four years of friendship. We spent hours and hours talking — honest, quiet moments that I’ll treasure forever.
On a more practical note — my friend had his chemo inpatient, so as a way of keeping his spirits up, I decorated a cork board (dubbed the Board of Awesome) that went to the hospital with him, and I put together a bunch of envelopes with stupid little things — webcomics, jokes, funny notes from our friends, whatever — so that he could open one on each day of his hospital stay. (I called it his chemo advent calendar.) I also got a pad of those 1/4 page scrapbook squares and an array of sharpies so that anyone who visited could leave him a note for the board. It was a big hit, including with the nurses.
Best – This is the first time I’ve ever felt compelled to actually leave a comment about an entry to the Vine but you could be me from a few years ago, everything echoes the situation my family found ourselves in: Mother withholding information, the uber family caretaker, freakishy close family who speak to each other daily, living close to each other etc. Mum has been in remission for two years now but I just thought I’d let you in on a few of the tactics my brother and I used to get through the hard times and the treatment, I hope they help.
My Mum tried to keep information from us to protect us but if we spoke to Dad on his own we found he was usually willing to give us the basics, as long as we didn’t let on to Mum that we knew. We thought the deception was worth it as it kept us all sane and information is power and all that.
My Mum is an amazing cook and it’s common knowledge within my family that I am not the best of cooks, mainly due to laziness. So when Mum was feeling sick and helpless and laying on the couch my brother and I would volunteer to cook and when Mum protested we would tell her to teach us one of the family recipes and while I was cooking she would be giving advice and instructions from the couch. So, although she couldn’t cook for her family she could teach us how to cook and had we lost her (worst case scenario) the family recipes would not have died with her.
Mum also loved watching tv series on dvd (as someone suggested earlier). She also enjoyed live concert dvds of her favourite bands (mainly Queen). They let her lay back and close her eyes and listen to the music or watch actively if she was feeling well enough, and they had the added bonus of creating a bit of party atmosphere in the house.
I’ll stop now, as this is far too long, but if you would like any more information feel free to email me. In the meantime I’ll be sending lots of positive energy your way.
PS. The importance of taking time out for yourself cannot be emphasised enough. During Mum’s treatment my amazing boyfriend made me a standing weekly appointment for a massage, it was absolutely perfect in the circumstances. My friends also made it their mission to ensure I joined them once a week for dinner and a drink at our regular pub (sorry bar – forgive me I’m Australian). We came up with that strategy because they kept asking what they could do when Mum received her diagnosis and I told them that the best thing they could do would be to help me escape once a week and they took their mission very seriously, they never let me miss an appointment with them regardless of what mood I was in.
Peeved — All this talk about the toilet is making me very very glad that I was raised to close the lid on the toilet… no splashback issue, it’s more visually appealing in the bathroom, and I get equally annoyed at men and women who don’t close the lid. I know it doesn’t help the current situation, though, and I don’t really have suggestions for how to deal with it. :-/ But wow, you should NOT have to deal with that and clean up someone else’s pee every time you go in the bathroom. I keep picturing that spray bottle someone else suggested as a big bottle of antibacterial Windex with a note on it saying please clean up after yourself, positioned prominently atop the water tank so he’d be staring at it as he’s standing there.
And also, I know it’s not technically the wife’s issue, but is she really blind on this or just making excuses? Either way, she should not be cool with it, because it means that she is cleaning up all this pee, too. I can’t imagine that she’s not. I feel this is something that should have been dealt with before you even moved in… if she really thought it was D, he should have been confronted a long time ago. Which brings me back to thinking she knows it’s her husband.
“…had we lost her (worst case scenario) the family recipes would not have died with her.”
AusBec just remined me of something my aunt did, before Grandma got too old: gave her a tape recorder and asked her to record an oral history. We now have about 10 hours of precious memories in her own voice, which I have the honor of translating to digital media before the cassettes crumble to dust. In this case we still have Grandma, proudly working on year #102 as I speak, but she is no longer in any mental state for a project like that.
Best, if history/genalogy is important in your family, your Mom might be into you interviewing her, or helping her go through photos to scrapbook/journal. If she’s always been meaning to go through those pictures anyway, having you to lift boxes/reach for things/manage piles of sorted pics/etc. might make the difference between “…I’m too tired” and “good times that neither of you will forget.”
And the F Cancer sampler? Is totally awesome. I think the best part is the glimpse of sweet fabric and pretty colors that sets you up for gooey sentimentality, and then… bam. Mot juste indeed! (I should make the F Fibro version for my partner, since that condition has been kicking his ass this week.)
@The Best – one more piece of advice that helped me with my dad: watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It will make you feel stronger.
@Charla: I’m making that crossstitch for my dad fir Christmas!
ITA about closing the lid when flushing. There have been studies that show not doing it throws all sorts of digusting germs all over the place even without splash back.
When I was staying with a friend’s family they told me the elderley Grandfather (who was from another country so had all the same language barriers etc) was a random sprayer so we had to put the lid up after using the toilet. We did and yeah it worked… if you forgot though, oh it was repulsive! And this man had a wife for god knows how many years also.
I’d be inclined to talk to the wife, myself. I’m assuming that her command of English is better than her husband’s, from what you’ve said. If you can work out with her what the problem actually is and what the best solution might be, she can then communicate that to her husband in the way she thinks will be most effective.
Also, as you’d evidently rather like your own toilet (and who wouldn’t), how about an approach to the landlord to see if they’ll put an ensuite in your room — it will make the room more rentable in future and you could offer to go halves. I have actually had this work with landlords in the past (for putting in a phone line, which is no more expensive than a toilet).
When my Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer her doctor suggested a great idea for helping her to feels she was in control of the hair loss. She took part in Shave for a Cure, a charity that raises money for cancer research and care. The really cool part was that her school (she’s a teacher) got right behind her and 4 other people shaved their heads that day in support. They raised a couple of thousand dollars and she was able to be proud of her hair loss.
I love Cyntada’s oral history idea (which is worth doing even when your loved ones aren’t sick). If you want to give that a try, but aren’t sure how to get started, StoryCorps has a list of prompts on a variety of subjects: http://tinyurl.com/y8j7jmx
There’s a part of Peeved story that I’m not sure has been addressed yet:
“Once, P also implicated D as the culprit when he saw me come out of the bathroom looking disgusted.”
The guy apparently KNOWS that this is a problem (a disgusting one) and has decided to…pretend it’s not happening? Put the blame on someone else, instead of just aiming better or cleaning up his own damn pee? Being clueless would be one thing, but something about this situation seems stranger than just being unaware of the fact that he’s leaving splashes. Having a non-accusatory conversation with him is a good way to start, but I think Peeved needs to prepare herself to have a talk with the wife as well.
Wait…what? Adding an ensuite toilet is no more expensive than a phone line? Unless there is plumbing running to Peeved’s room, it will easily be a few thousand dollars to add an ensuite toilet. Not that it’s necessarily a bad idea, but…come on. It’s a pretty major undertaking for the landlord, even if the tenants pay for it themselves.
I love the idea of making sure you have all her recipes recorded. My Mom to this day regrets the loss of my great-grandmother’s legendary apple pie recipe. She always cooked from memory, because she had made the pie the same way for so many years. By the time anybody realized that it was not recorded anywhere she had started to go senile, and her memory of the recipe slipped away. She tried to provide instructions, but it wasn’t the same, and my Mom and Grandma have never been able to replicate the recipe exactly as she used to make it. So this advice is not only for people dealing with an imminent medical crisis.
I’m actually wondering if maybe P is using the tenant’s bathroom because his wife bugs him about the mess he leaves when he uses their own bathroom… and maybe he figures Peeved won’t want to tackle the landlord about his splash problem, and he’ll be off the hook.
@Bria. Yes, it would cost the landlord money, but it wouldn’t necessarily be that difficult or expensive – like you say, it would depend on the existing plumbing. I suggested it because I have a friend who’s a buy-to-let landlady and she’s quite often asked by her tenants if she’ll make changes. Sometimes she says yes — it depends if there’s a shortage of reliable tenants and if she thinks it’ll improve her investment.
I was trying to think around the problem, as it’s been my experience that changing plumbing can be easier than changing people! (also, the phone thing was a fairly major undertaking as none of the houses in the road had phones — unbelievable I know, but it wasn’t that common to not be on the telephone in that area in the 1990s, and mobiles weren’t in general use yet. The landlord took our point that we didn’t want to have to walk to the nearest phone box if we needed to call the fire brigade…)
Anyway, I shall shut up now as I have clearly become slightly obsessed with plumbing after doing two bathroom installation projects in two years. Just felt very sorry for Peeved as I think this sort of behaviour in adults is hard to fix if they have no incentive to change.
Best,
Sorry about your Mom. :..(
But, if she’s a reader, puzzler, sewer, knitter, gamer, etc. all you have to do to be close & help may be to do some sit-down activities with her as ‘hanging out’ instead of ‘caring for the ill’ or ‘mothering Mom’.
On good days, do each other’s nails (your sis can join in there, too!). On bad days (and with chemo, there WILL be some of those, but hopefully not too many), bring a laptop or portable DVD player or a pair of books, and spend down time with a little distraction and maybe a little conversation. Plan meals for when she gets out of the hospital, including some that are tummy-soft versions of her favorites…
Spoil her, but don’t baby her?
And when she needs some alone time? Allow that, as difficult as it is. Use the rest of your family as they use you: support, love, laughter, tears, control-freak-out sessions and venting, play time, prayer time… don’t forget to take care of ALL of you, in all of this. And to let yourself be taken care of, too.
God bless your family. *HUG*