9 things

Nine things about my mother ...

Yes, I know that it should be 90, in celebration of her birthday last week, but you'd get bored with reading the list, long before I got bored with making it.

1. My mom moved into the granny flat at our house earlier this year. it was a big move for her, away from all the friends she had made in the retirement resort (it was never an 'old age home'). It has been an interesting journey. We have spent more time together than we have since I was in school and it has been an adjustment that has been easier than I expected.

2. I am much more tired than my mother. Or is it laziness? Every morning I take her a cappuccino made by Greg and without fail she is up and dressed, make up on and ready to tackle the world. I am up and dressed too, but most days all I want to do is go back to bed.

3. I have never, ever seen my mom lying down for a nap during the day. Not once.

4. I am awed by the patience my mother has with the people who treat her like she is invisible because she is old. I am beyond frustrated by people who speak to me rather than her when there are forms to fill in or banking to do.

5. I'm interested by the fact that my mom seems to become stronger with age - or maybe it is more stubborn?

6. Our journey together is in a new stage, and it is fascinating to see how we navigate the changes in dependencies. Neither of us is dependent on the other, but there are times when we each need to lean a little and it is good that we can.

7. My mom likes routines and patterns. That's why we now eat take away on a Friday, and I know that if it is 6pm she would have turned the TV on for the first time for the day. The mornings are spent sewing incredibly intricate cross stitch and the afternoons are for reading. That is, if she is not out in her car visiting friends or shopping.

8. My mom is active and engaged and interested in so many things, and it makes me sad to think that there are so many people, younger than her, who are just waiting to die instead of relishing the gift of living.
Out for dinner with two of her grandsons

9. I've always been the shortest person in my family, and today I noticed that my mom is shorter than me. That means she has shrunk by 5 inches (which means if I make it to 90 I'll only be 4 foot 5 - that's not even 1.5 meters high. Sigh)

Comments

Molly said…
So glad the co-living thing is working out. When my Granny turned 100 last week it brought home the very real chance (hopefully!) that my mother will live until an old age, and possibly live with us at some stage. Interesting notion indeed.
22 September 2017 at 18:01
Caroline said…
Wow Lynne, your Mom sounds like an amazing woman - I hope I have half her energy when I'm old. Great post!
23 September 2017 at 00:37
robbie said…
It's lovely to hear about your new road together! You are lucky to have it and to be enjoying it! She is a great lady, but you are too Lynne - being so honest about things! I had to giggle about your height though! Love to you both
24 September 2017 at 12:17
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the writer formerly known as...

Twenty years after I was born a Brooks, I became a Wilson in one of those happy-ever-after fantasies that didn't quite work out the way I had planned. But Wilson was a nice name, and eminently preferable to Brooks (which in Afrikaans means underpants or knickers and led to horrible teasing at school) and I quite enjoyed it. It was one of those anonymous names that everyone could spell and I liked the fact that it was totally normal at first look, but had a secret history. The great grandfather of the Mr Wilson I married had emigrated from somewhere near Moscow to the US and like so many others with unpronouncable or "difficult" names (I think it was Tobinofsky) he was given another one. One of the legends is that Wilson was chosen from the phone book, another is that he particularly admired a Wilson (couldn't have been Harold). So, for the next 25 years or so, I built my name and reputation as the journalist Lynne Wilson ... until I met and married my new happy-ever-a
Read more

Like faded flowers, thrown away: Steve Biko and the Boer women

Image
A Boer woman with her dead child, the last of her children to die, photographed by Emily Hobhouse The women are wonderful. They cry very little and never complain. The very magnitude of their sufferings, their indignities, loss and anxiety seems to lift them beyond tears… only when it cuts afresh at them through their children do their feelings flash out. Some people in town still assert that the Camp is a haven of bliss. I was at the camp to-day, and just in one little corner this is the sort of thing I found – The nurse, underfed and overworked, just sinking on to her bed, hardly able to hold herself up, after coping with some thirty typhoid and other patients, with only the untrained help of two Boer girls–cooking as well as nursing to do herself. Next tent, a six months’ baby gasping its life out on is mother’s knee. Two or three others drooping sick in that tent. Next, a girl of twenty-one lay dying on a stretcher. The father, a big, gentle Boer kneeling beside her; while,
Read more

mind the gap

I'm suffering from an excess of velleity. Velleity is volition at its weakest. It's a mere wish or inclination, without any accompanying effort. My velleity is fed by an overactive imagination... I can see in my mind's eye exactly what my dream garden looks like, for example. So when I am outside, I'm imagining a tree there, a shrub here, a winding path and a bank of flowers. so the lack of all those things and the lack of effort on my part to make them happen don't worry me so much. It certainly makes things easier when you are living with a very large garden during our excessively hot and dry summers. I'd write more... but what can I say? Velleity strikes again.
Read more