The Same Thing Happens Every Time

I’ve been having a recurring nightmare lately. In it, I am 77 years old, barely mobile, half-blind…and I am still dragging Dave’s mother around everywhere I go. It could happen; some people live to be 98 years old, and if anyone will, Mother will.
I wish you could meet Dave’s mother. She really needs to be experienced, she cannot be described. Having said that, I am going to try to describe her. She is short, scrawny, with bird-like legs, salt and pepper hair that is still mostly pepper, and glasses that magnify her eyes so that she looks like an owl. She stares and blinks like an owl as well. She likes clothes that are too big for her, and tends to wear shorts most of the time, so she looks like a cartoon character with her stick legs dangling out of shorts that three of her could wear at one time. She walks bent over, elbows working, taking four steps to my one- and I slow down for her, so my one step is very leisurely- but she can never keep up, so I slow down even further… and when I come to a complete stop, I realize that she has zigged with uncanny speed either to the left or right, and is gone.
Which brings me to this segment of “The Same Thing Happens Every Time.”
Examples:
Dave and I take her to Lowe’s because she says she wants to come. We don’t have much shopping to do, but even so, when we get there, she decides to stay in the car. Not up to all that walking. We dash in, dash out, gone 15 minutes tops, get back to the car… and of course, she is gone. 30 minutes later, we find her. She went for a walk.

We head out to visit our son and his family. Mother wants to come with us. We travel to Manchester, spend a little time, eat a little dinner… and notice Mother is gone. Where is she? Sitting in the car. No pressure to go home, huh?

She likes to go out to eat. She won’t tell me where she wants to go or what she wants to eat, and is usually disappointed with whatever choice I make. When we get to the restaurant, she refuses to order anything to drink, heads straight for the bathroom, and comes back expecting me to have ordered for her. When the waitress asks what she wants to eat, she stares and blinks. When she finally speaks, 7 times out of 10 she uses what I lovingly call her “stroke” voice - swollen tongued, halting, over-exaggerated pronunciations- which is so patently phony that waitresses have been known to laugh out loud. I’ll tell you about her phony faint some other time, but will mention here that it is hilarious.
Anyway, back to the same thing happens every time… she orders her meal and the minute the food comes, she asks for a doggie bag. She eats about six mouthfuls and is “full”. I have learned to inhale my food rather than eat with her sitting with her doggie bag on her lap, blinking at me. The waitress offers her something to drink several times during the meal, but she doesn’t ask for anything until the bill comes. We wait for the drink, wait for the bill to be re-tabulated… and she leaves without drinking the drink and forgets her doggie bag. (Which is just as well, because when she remembers to bring it home, it just rots in the fridge- she doesn’t like left-overs.)

She’s always spoken with a barely comprehensible Polish-American accent but as she has aged- and survived a couple of mild strokes- her speech has become more disjointed and harder to follow. I am her interpreter because I understand what she is saying, though there are times when I misinterpret her deliberately. Well, unless she walks up to 600 pound men at Tractor Supply, and says things like “Oh, you are so fat!” It’s kind of hard to misinterpret that. I just follow her around and mouth “stroke victim” to whomever she is currently talking to.

Mother loves talking to strangers. She loves inflicting her personality on people. She has been calling herself an “old lady” since she became a grandmother at 41; now she tells anyone who will listen that she is 77 years old as if expecting them to say “NO! Surely not! That’s older than the world!” and is always disappointed when they don’t. She tells perfect strangers that she is homeless (she's not -she lives with Dave and I and has a whole wing of the house to herself); she tells them that we don’t feed her (we do), or that we make her stay in her room all the time (we don't); and, my personal favorite, that she has no one to care for her. As you may have surmised, Mother is not the most truthful person on the planet. She will tell her tale of woe to someone one day, and Social Services will show up the next. Thank God we live in a small town where people know us- and Mother.

Whenever Mother is bored- which, sadly, is most of the time because she won’t do anything for herself anymore- she tends to make long, prolonged, and very irritating sounds. Barking like a dog. Cackling like a hen. Repeating a phrase over and over, LOUDLY! If we are watching something on TV she doesn’t want to watch, she sings. LOUDLY! If that doesn’t work, she interacts with the cat. LOUDLY! (By the way, she has decided my cat Patches is a dog, because she doesn’t like cats, but she does like Patches, so Patches must be a dog.)

There are other little things. My housekeeper Stephanie is also her caretaker when I am away, and is as good and gentle and sweet with her as one human being can be with another. Mother calls her Sadie. She calls her Sadie because my last housekeeper was named Sadie. Apparently Mother thinks all housekeepers are named Sadie. The only problem with this premise is that my last housekeeper was named Sandy, not Sadie.

Don’t get me wrong. Mother can be and is cute, she can be sweet, and she is incredibly generous. When I was sick with the flu, she took care of me the best she could and I appreciated it. She is willing to scratch my back, an admirable quality in any person. It’s not that she doesn’t have an upside. There are lots of times when we crack each other up and for the most part, we live and work well together. I love her. I even like her.

It’s just that I keep having this recurring nightmare.