When I was a kid, I loved watching Mr. Peabody; a genius, bowtie-wearing beagle with his pet human, Sherman. They would travel in his Wayback Machine to learn about history.
For the past month and a half, I've been living that cartoon. Because on January 1st, I became Sherman to my 93-year-old, sling-wearing mother.
Let me set the stage: my New Year's resolution for 2024 was to see 52 live bands and volunteer 52 times in 52 weeks. Basically, it was a self-centered year of working and playing. I fit in other things when I could: my family and friends, doing things around the house. By the end of the year, my resolutions were checked off, but not much else. Since so many sites were touting not having resolutions but instead having a word of the year for 2025, I picked one to try; "FOCUS". I would focus on family, friends, finances and even getting fit. All "F" words-so fabulous!
And then New Year's morning came. It's a good thing that I stopped cursing years ago, or another "F" word might have been uttered.
Just after 8AM, my brother called, saying that he was in an ambulance enroute to the hospital with our mom. It was a mad dash there, only to learn that she fell off a ladder taking down Christmas decorations and broke her humerus right by the shoulder. Hours later, with just a sling and a script for Oxycodone, she was out, and I was in. The woman who was totally independent just the day before now needed round-the clock assistance. I proved the most-likely candidate to step up and move in.
Since then, every morning over breakfast is when we talk about wayback stuff, some funny and some tremendously painful. We've travelled back to the 1940's and where she was the morning Pearl Harbor was attacked (playing shuffleboard in the bar her parents owned. No mandatory Sunday Mass for those kids like we had.) On to the1950's where on her high school graduation night, her father left the family for another woman and their love child. The 60's, where she cared for her mother-in-law, a woman dying of breast cancer who refused to babysit us three kids even though we lived next door. I do remember coming home from second grade and feeding my newborn sister while my mom cooked for her and my grandfather. Each day held a new nugget of information I never knew.
She relentlessly prayed to God that he would heal her quickly, even though the doctors said she would heal in due time. It might take a couple of months, but she would get better. As I went through her filing cabinet, I came across her high school report cards and found she failed a Religion final exam from the same high school I graduated from. I told her God doesn't listen to girls who played shuffleboard instead of going to church and failed religion. She was not amused.
If I could, I would send the Wayback machine back ten years to the times after my dad passed and I took her on a couple of vacations to Newport and then Ireland. She was bounding on and off busses, wide-eyed and curious about everything we saw, then overjoyed meeting her great-uncle Micael and cousins for the first time in Sligo. It was a bit shocking on our return for my son's wedding two years ago how slow she had become.
Living here has had its moments. Like the great
Lemon Pepper debacle with Wingman's ashes, brushing my teeth one morning proved to be the joke of the month. For the first time since my kids were babies, I was bathing, dressing and feeding another human, made sure she got her pills morning and night, rubbing lotion on her dry skin and yes, even dressing some sores on her butt. As I got ready for work one day, I rushed to brush my teeth and squeezed silicone butt cream on my toothbrush instead of Crest. (In my defense, the tubes are the exact same color blue, and I immediately realized the error from the color of the contents before it even got close to my mouth). I came out of the bathroom holding the now ruined toothbrush and told my brother what I just did. The two of us laughed so hard we cried. You probably saw it on his social media before I even wrote about it here. And yes, I used some of my future inheritance buying myself a new toothbrush from Mom's grocery money.
If all goes well and I'm here in another 20+ years like I plan to be, my sons won't have to worry about taking care of me thanks to my albeit expensive, but necessary long term care insurance policy. If they're really lucky, I'll never use it, and it will convert to a payout for them. If they're smart, they'll pay it even if I can't. Because none of them will want to have the other two laughing until they cry if they mistakenly put my butt cream on their toothbrush. The backlash would be brutal.
