Author: Elisabeth

‘You can’t stop,’ my daughter said. ‘I need your
help.  Besides, mothers don’t get
sick.  Mothers stay well.’  She stomped out of the room.

   

My mother plans to live till she’s one hundred. 

‘That’s six more years,’ I told her on my last visit.  ‘That’s a long time.’

‘But it’s something special to live to one hundred.  There’s no big deal in being
ninety-five. And time goes so fast these days.’  My mother wiped her nose on a tissue and threw it into
the  wastepaper basket by her
chair.  My mother goes through
tissues like they are breaths of air. 
‘I don’t do a thing these days,’ she went on, ‘but that’s okay.  I should be allowed to go slow.  I’m ninety four.  I deserve a rest.’

I do not repeat the mantra, ‘if you don’t use it, you lose
it’.  Why not stop still in her
chair and do nothing?

Why not sit each day surrounded by books, the trashy Mills
and Boon type of novels my mother reads, all are readily available from the
library in her retirement village; all she can read these days for the large
print? 

My mother reads these books the way she eats
chocolate.  I never bother to ask
her what each book is about.  I
suspect she could not tell me.  She
reads books like people read the trashy magazines in doctors’ surgeries –  eye candy, fodder for the mind. 

‘Why should I worry? 
My mother asks me yet again. 
A rhetorical question.  
She does not expect an answer and I’m not inclined to offer one. 

‘Why should I worry about my children?  There’s nothing I can do about
them.  They have their lives.  They make their own decisions.  I have nothing to worry about.’

When I sit with my mother as I do at least once a week and
she tells me yet again how much she fails to worry, does she see the skepticism
in my eyes?

Probably not. 
She refuses to wear her glasses, except to read.  Glasses do not suit her sense of the
fashionable.  Glasses make her look
old.  And so she can barely
see.  She will not see.

 

Those three wise monkeys come to mind.