My elderly mother recently came to stay for a couple of weeks. Living in different countries, such visits used to happen often, but Covid and passport administration errors, put a stop to them in 2020. The last time my mum had been to stay was Christmas 2019.
We’ve seen each other of course. I swoop in on her and my dad as often as I can. But a self-employed / mother / wife / dog owner can only leave her nest for so long; so my visits have often been brief. And due to space constraints, longer visits with the family in tow haven’t been spent under their roof – instead we’ve rented holiday lets, 30 minutes or so away from where they live.
Consequently, it has been four and half years since my mother and I spent more than a few days in each other’s company.
Nature, I learned, can do a lot to a person in that time. Especially to a person that came into existence four score years ago.
My mother was born in a year dominated by the second world war. Three months after she was born, fifty German V-1 flying bombs, air-launched from Heinkel He 111 bombers flying over the North Sea, targeted Greater Manchester and injured more than a 100 people in a town only five miles away from where my mother and her family lived.
In my mother’s birth year, life was all about coupons and queues. There was a shortage of supplies and very little stock. As shortages increased, the queues became longer. It wasn’t unusual to reach the front of a long queue, only to find out that the item they had been waiting for had just run out. Meals were functional, clothing was mended.
When your life starts out this way, it’s hard to become anything but frugal.
Consequently, my childhood was all about budget, hand me down clothes, and ‘free’ entertainment. Leftovers were tomorrow’s menu, washed plastic bags ruled our washing line, and there was always another night’s worth of toothpaste in the tube.
For those of you who haven’t encountered frugality close up, a frugal person likes to stay at home, doesn’t spoil their children, repairs things instead of buying new, and keeps routine.
I love my mum very much, but I am weirdly the complete opposite. Against the odds, I am a person who shops for ‘entertainment’, cooks a spare steak for the dog, and says ‘no’ to my children whilst dipping into my purse to fund their next adventure or to rectify their last mistake.
Nevertheless, despite mine and my mother's differences, once I had cleared my teenage insolence, we have always maintained a good relationship. Though in the main, we avoid the ‘frivolous’ activities (such as overpriced restaurants and non-essential shopping!), we have lots of common interests and have enjoyed doing lots of things together. Some of my very best memories include my mother and I exploring Menorca, canoeing French lakes in an inflatable canoe, and her attempts to push my husband home in a well-known supermarket’s trolley.
But much of the 'fun stuff' requires an acquiescent body and sadly there are tribulations for the bodies of those who are fortunate enough to enter their ninth decade.
My mother’s body played a cruel trick on her a few weeks before she came to stay when, whilst tending her homegrown produce, only yards from her back door, she found herself inexplicably laying on the floor and unable to get herself up. Fortunately my father was home and able to assist, but the damage was done, and the pain and bruises were there to prove it.
When mum arrived, her life had shifted. She was frail; physically of course from the fall, but whether it was the shock of the fall, or something that she had become adept at hiding for the last 4 and a half years, she was emotionally changed too.
Her hugs were a little tighter, almost unnoticeably longer, her smiles slightly thinner, and her mind was preoccupied with memories, as though the future was harder to look to.
For the first time, I saw my mother not as an individual who was inevitably ageing, but as one who had aged. And despite her four score years, I still wasn't ready for that.
In the short time we spent together I became hyper vigilant to any changes in her that might mean something. A hand, uncannily similar to my own, reaching towards me as she approached new terrain, a wince indicative of pain that came from nowhere, a brief glimpse of confusion for something that should have been familiar. My concern resulted in repeated questions, are you okay, can I help? Questions that were patiently fielded, but without conviction.
I suspect that my mother’s wisdom exceeds my own, and that she knows that an honest answer wouldn’t change anything. You can’t heal old age with paracetamol, antiseptic, and a plaster. Voicing the pain and confusion that her ageing body and mind now combat, would only give the symptoms a stage on which to perform. And who wants their final act to be one that leaves the audience exhausted from viewing such a battle?
Nevertheless even unspoken, mum’s growing disappointment at her body’s failings was clear. It wrapped itself around her, and like the jumpers she used to knit us for Christmas, it grew and grew, until it covered me too.
But disappointment requires an adjustment of expectations or an acceptance of a new reality, and I had neither. Consequently instead of being made with disappointment, my jumper was knit with frustration.
And, upon reflection whilst it wasn’t conscious, I fear that in those precious few weeks I spent with my equally precious mum, my frustration hijacked my sensitivity and I selfishly forgot that it was more important that I adapt to mum’s new rhythm, than she keep up with the old one.
I didn’t mean to be impatient, but I fear that I was.
Every day I work to deadlines; I juggle responsibilities and my schedules are tight. I am in charge of my own agenda and my timetables are drawn up based on efficiency. But even so, in hindsight, I could have lingered in the kitchen with her longer in the mornings whilst she retold a story that she couldn’t remember having told me the day before. I could have stayed sat on that bench a little longer to admire the view and reminisce. Maybe had another cup of tea. There was nowhere more important that I needed to be. Why did I check every incoming notification on my phone? Every email? Why didn’t I recognise that my timetable was never going to be more important than mine and hers.
It was only later, when contact had returned online, and kisses and hugs had reverted to being virtual, that I truly recognised the time that I'd taken for granted. I saw how I'd wasted the opportunity to move into mum's world for a while. To help her explore her memories and to reassure her that she is still in charge of her future - for it is still hers to make.
Instead my impatience likely reinforced what she was already thinking. That she was interrupting my life, stealing my time.
She wasn't.
Since we’ve returned to our own countries, my life has been filled with her absence and I've even realised that we're not that different after all. I may not be as frugal with money, but I am frugal with my time. I may think I don't keep a routine, but I do as my diary dictates.
I am already planning my next rendezvous with my mother. And this time, I promise to listen to every retold story and to sit for as long as we need.
In this fast moving world, it’s too easy to forget that the alternate to having 'old' parents, is considerably worse to bear.
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