cleolinda | Life in recovery

I am so tired I barely know where to start. You know how I said that my mother once tried to mop the kitchen floor the same day that she came back from a minor knee surgery? I was not making that up. (Am I ever?) I thought I'd be here taking care of a baby--someone who had to sleep most of the day in a recliner and couldn't get anything for herself. But no. No, it couldn't be like that, because that would be easy. Instead, I'm here chasing a 57-year-old toddler around the house.

Friday: Mom came home from the hospital just as Sister Girl and I finished running errands. (Mom has been on a quest for a month to find someplace, anyplace, that actually stocks a non-Blu-Ray copy of Green Zone, and I finally managed to find one for her.) She immediately began to unpack, by which I mean she sat in bed and waved us around the room to put up her three hundred toiletries. Remember: this is a woman who sat up in bed the night after her surgery and put in her contacts, put on her makeup, and painted her nails.

Saturday: I end up chasing my mother around the kitchen to take the vacuum cleaner away from her. "But there's DOG HAIR on the floor!" I start denying this fact, and then a Scout-colored tumbleweed drifts by. So while I'm vacuuming--because if I don't, right then, she will--I hear the clanking of her walker heading towards the laundry room. Okay, fine. The problem is that I eventually realize that she's walkering back towards me with a mop in her hand. Which I also confiscated. Honestly, the doctor did tell her to walk around for ten minutes each hour. She can do laps around the dining room if she wants. But when she starts doing things with her hands--like toting a big pile of laundry through the house--that means she can't grab onto the walker if she loses her footing. And if she can't hold on, that's when she's going down.

"You know, I watched Green Zone last night. It was terrible!"

Sunday: "Look, you can clean all the counters you want. Clean the microwave! Have a party! But I am going to sit here and watch you do it, because you're not falling down and jacking up your knee on my watch."

And then I wrestled the vacuum away from her again.

Monday: My mother's idea of relaxation is turning up the new Clash of the Titans really loud and then hobbling around the kitchen doing God knows what. No, I did not read Clash of the Titans in Fifteen Minutes aloud to her. Although she did read it when I first posted it, and she did really like it. So there's that.

Also, Mom's physical therapist was an hour late again. This makes us Not Happy.

Tuesday: Mom is writing thank you notes for the flowers and cards she got from the office. Also, she seems to have no indoor voice, because I am now fully debriefed on university hiring policies via a number of phone calls from said office. As of this moment, I am making us a margherita pizza, by which I mean "taking it out of the box and heating it for ten minutes." Also, I have now seen a goodly portion of Australia, which is one of my mother's favorite movies. Faramir, you are a dick.

"Oh my God. This looks like the most depressing movie ever. They put the little kid on a boat and Faramir's standing there gloating about it and Nicole Kidman's all crying and then they blow up their house and suddenly she's got all these Army blouses--"

"That's not their house, that's just a building, but now Hugh Jackman thinks she's dead--"

"--and that guy is in jail and they just shot that other guy and everything's on fire and they're taking the children away and I can't even imagine what this movie would be like if they'd actually killed off Hugh Jackman like they meant to."

"Well, Faramir is a dick, but he gets his. He gets his GOOD. He wants to kill the children--THEY WERE GOING TO KILL HUGH JACKMAN OFF?!?!?"

I have no idea what we're going to do this afternoon. Except that I'm pretty sure it's going to be loud and involve me not getting work done. God bless.