What to do about Mama. . .

So my cousin called, the one who first broke the astonishing news about periods, the one whose Mama is my Mama's sister.  Evidently my mama who can't hear had called her Mama who has difficulty speaking and trouble began to brew.  According to my cousin who heard it from her Mama, my Mama said we were "trying to put her in a home." And my cousin, who kept saying it was none of her business, was calling to change our minds.

Oh dear.

The problem is that this is ever so slightly true.  In the past three months, our dear Mom has turned 89 and happy birthday has developed diabetes, spinal stenosis and two bulging disks.  This is in addition to the rheumatoid arthritis, hypertension, depression, osteoporosis, etcetera.  She is now on heavy pain medication, bless her, in addition to the rest of her prescriptions.  This very morning she is meeting with (what we hope is a highly competent, but how do you know) neurosurgeon whom we hope will agree to fix her back, however that is done.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood where she has lived for fifty-odd years seems to be headed South; the west side of the house needs painting, she can't drive or handle her checkbook anymore and the laundry is located down some perilous stairs.  Each of lives at least guilt+300 miles away. Until recently, although it is hard to imagine now, she was taking herself to the grocery and had a caretaker a couple of afternoons a week.  Now with the back pain and the diabetes, we are up to 24-hour shifts, and occasional no-shows which give Mom the chance to eat cookies for breakfast.  I know, if you can't eat cookies when you are 89 when are you going to get to do it?  


Well, this is kind of like the other morning.  Evidently it was pretty rough, the back pain and all, and no one had showed, again, so Mom called Sonja the Saintly (her primary caretaker who is the Number One reason for her being alive today) and asked if it would be all right if she had a glass of wine with her pain pill.  Sonja, who lives all the way down in Mosheim, whose next-door-neighbor-good-for-nothing-son-in-law had just been taken to the hospital for what turned out to be a unfortunately short period, said she didn't see any harm in a small glass.  Sonja is Baptist, so this may have hurt her, but everybody means well and Mom is still with us and was a happy camper when I called her later that day. On the what-are-you-doing-to-your-body scale, it probably ranked right up there with the chicken McNuggets she had for lunch yesterday.  Better living through chemistry.

But I digress.

Mom has the brochure for The Home, and has actually been out there and thought it was pretty nice.  Plus, according to my brother, my second-grade teacher is there (how can that be?  She was a thousand years old when I was seven) and my sixth-grade teacher is there too, (who was a thousand and four). And rumor has it there are a couple of people from The Church.  Periodically when we are talking, Mom will talk about how hard it is to keep up with everything, and perhaps unfortunately, we children are raised to go into action and fix whatever we can.  It helps with the guilt.

The seesaw of going or not going, evidently, had Mom having panic attacks, which manifested in her having trouble breathing while simultaneously wanting to "go and do," our old neighbor's euphemism for getting out and about.  Decision-making is not my mother's best thing, which she knows, under the best of circumstances, and when you add the pain and the pain medication, well, everything gets a little screwy.

Decision-making really it isn't our best thing either, the Committee of Four, her supposedly grown children.  So until we get this back thing figured out, Going or Not Going to The Home is on hold.  I told my cousin this, and that it is ultimately up to Mom.

What we want, of course, the Committee of Four, plus Mom, is for her to be happy and to be safe.  What we really want is for her to be thirty or even forty years younger and in perfect health. What we really want, just to the left of our wracking love for this woman,  is to not be looking in the mirror.