<p>So, old mom, you are the oldest of three siblings. Sorry your brothers are so inept, and it is too bad they are in bad health so young.</p>
<p>Just telling stories. Yesterday I picked DD3 from a playdate with a little girl whose parents are from the Phillipines. (sp?) We always have "mom"talk after the play dates–she is very gregarious and talkative, and very, very warm and friendly and keeps me to talk. So I told her about my sister. This mom is much younger than me and just judging from her house and lifestyle (BAD thing to do, my big flaw, I know it and work on it–my husband–a believing Christian–would call it a “sin”)), I just thought her life was “easier”; everything spotless in the house, landscaping, perfect clothes, in comparison to me, who drives a wreck of a car, plus a brush through her hair once a day, and is always falling apart. So when she asked me, how are things, I mentioned my mother’s ills but minimized them, but said I was sorry I was so mysteriously estranged from my sister, and asked her, what did she think it was all about?. She then proceeded to tell me how, when her FIL with cancer fell to the floor in Queens (NYC), his own son in nearby Staten Island would not go to bring him to the ER; she herself–a DIL–drove 1 1/2 hrs from the country where we live to get him and take him to the ER. (Later, I wondered, why didn’t she just call an ambulance? So strange…I wonder, why?). At the same time she was flying back and forth to the Phillipines to take care of her mother with cancer. I felt so bad to think of how I superficially, wrongly assumed their lives were “all youth and a breeze”; clearly there is so much for so many going on below the surface.</p>
<p>Made it back from the shoe maker this afternoon without having a car accident or hitting a pedestrian. But my mother–the super-brain–pulled one on me. She remembered, like from yrs ago, one yr for Christmas or a birthday we got a birthday cake or Xmas cake from Trader Joe’s in Danbury. The girls and I have a ritual of stopping there on the way home from Chinese school on Saturdays as a “reward” for Chinese School. My mother learned about the wondrous Trader Joes. She LEAPED on this opportunity and asked us each week to pick up for her some delicacy from the bakery in Trader Joes. Such a minor thing, but you know, it just interfered with my intimate afternoons with my girls, burdened me with a responsibility, and worst of all, made it necessary for me to take the goodie to my mother’s every Sat afternoon and stay for a brief visit. Well, she has an iron-trap memory. The shoe-maker was in Danbury today and she said she wanted to stop at Trader Joes for baked goods and bread. Now, if I were a bent-over 87 yr old who need a walker or shopping cart to ambulate,so slowly, I would just send my daughter in to pick out “something sweet and a white bread or rye” or whatever she wanted. But no, she had to go in, the caregiver and I had to move the shopping cart to her car door and take baby steps with her while she made her way into this super-packed store. To my stupefaction, she examined every baked good for expiration date, list of ingredients, cost, will I like it best or not…she even turned the items down to look at the bottoms of the pans…am I wrong, but is this weird? Is it weird to leave two other people standing by doing nothing while you indulge in a time-consuming self-satsfying exercise? Or is what you do for an 87 yr old mother who has so few pleasures in life? She said she wanted a rye bread so I scooted over to the rye bread section and said this is the only one they had. She mused for a minute about whether she wanted seeds or not…I couldn’t believe it. She accepted the rye bread. </p>
<p>The caregiver is a dream. She made goulash with noodles for my mother last night. My mother told me they have conversations about history and art. In the waiting room with her this afternoon, I was reading a bio of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the caregiver takes about the friction between the principalities that are now modern France, and about the 12th century crusades. She is quick to do everything in her job description, and goes way beyond. It is a shame that the new minimum wage laws/overtime/sick leave/paid vacation laws go into effect on 1/1/15, but the glaring fact is that we cannot continue to afford her. In a few words, she is doing GREAT withmy mother.</p>
<p>With the AL visits we have lined up, I have to talk to each counselor about the undesirable possibility that my mother runs out of cash before she/we sell her house, and how do we keep her in AL and pay for it while the house is is on the market. One woman scheduled to give us a tour said 'the business office will guide you through that." So I should try to…relax…</p>