Almost Sorry I Asked

I called my mother late last night. I should call her more often - it's cheap enough to call every day if I wanted - but I keep running into time conflicts that have cropped up every since she moved to The Plantation. There are only certain times in my day when I can speak with her relatively uninterrupted and some of those times coincide with her meal times. She eats lunch at 11:30am and dinnertime for them is 4:30pm. 4:30. You know you've crossed over to being officially old when you eat dinner at 4:30pm.

During the conversation I was able to squeeze in before her 4:30 appointment with a chicken pot pie and Jello I asked how she was feeling.

"Well, my back hasn't recovered yet from when I tried to pick that lady up off the floor."

It's times like these when I wonder if she's telling me the truth or she's confabulating a story due to her Alzheimer's.

"Would it be silly of me to ask why you were picking up a lady from the floor?"

"I was walking by her room and that old lady just stumbled and fell down so I went in to pick her up."

My mother is 75 years old so I can't imagine how old this other woman must have been for my mother to have pegged her as being an "old lady".

"She just fell out there on the floor and I tried to help pick her up but I just couldn't do it."

"Mother! You're not supposed to be picking people up off the floor! You're in an assisted living center! There are nurses and aids all over! You don't have the ability to pick anyone up off the floor!"

"Well I know that now!"

I had to leave it at a "Well, don't do that again. Ring for the nurse next time.". I figured that she'd probably already been blessed out enough by the staff and by my sister. Holy smokes. I can practically see my sister levitate off the ground when she heard this story. I wouldn't be surprised if her shrieks were heard over the state line.

I think that sometimes I'm accidentally forgetting on purpose to call my mother more regularly. I think I'm trying to avoid hearing stories like these. It makes me sad and a little bit crazy for me not to be there when she's doing stupid stuff like trying to pick up little old ladies. She forgets where she is and forgets that she can't do things like that and I'm trying to forget that this is what's happening to her. Deny! Deny! Do it enough and your skewed reality may actually become reality! Maybe if I put more effort in keeping up with her then it all wouldn't seem to foreign to me.

I need to get home for a visit. I need to see for myself how my mom is doing because what goes on via a phone conversation only informs me so much. I would like to make a trip home this spring but my MIL isn't able to be here for B while her knee isn't 100% and then she'll be going on a spa vacation for two weeks in late April/early May. I'm not crazy about being in Mississippi in the middle of summer so maybe I'll aim for September or October. I don't know. Maybe I'll just go whenever I get the chance. Stop denying that the window of opportunity to travel is getting smaller all the time.