What a week it was last week! Mom has been her usual self and I have had a full week of watching her. She has manically walked in and out of the house to the porch, the kitchen, the hall, the kitchen, the porch. Over and over...round and round she goes. Each time, she leaves the door to the porch open and I can practically see the dollar bills flying out the door as the cool air escapes into the hot muggy outdoors. In between these meanderings, Mom always circles the kitchen touching everything that is left out. If food is out she snips off a piece, samples, bites, or pokes her finger into whatever the item is. This is a problem because her hygiene is so poor I cannot keep up with where her fingers have been. I shudder just to think about it. The other day, Skip made the grievous mistake of leaving half a peach out on the counter. Mom had just finished a large lunch including her fill of peach slices, but in her demented state she didn't remember this fact and so she stood up from her place at the counter, (some sandwich still on her plate) and picked up the peach. My attention having been diverted for a moment didn't notice this and therefore it wasn't until Skip returned for his remaining peach half that I saw what had happened.
"Um...did you take a bite of this?" He asked accusingly. He held up the peach with a large bite right out of the center of it.
I laughed out loud. "Really? Would I do that?! If I wanted a bite of your peach I would have taken a knife and sliced a piece off."
Skip nodded in agreement. He knows my habits and realized immediately that he was 'barking up the wrong tree'. Then he cast a dark look at my mother. Imagining the germ-infested peach, he handed her the rest of it. I felt sorry for him because it was a really lovely peach. (We haven't had many of those this year.)
Caring for Mom is a full-time job, but there are always other things in our lives that keep us spinning, our lives in turmoil, and our days full of distractions. For example, it is currently hurricane season here in North Carolina which means that when a storm develops out in the Atlantic, we immediately go into our hurricane preparedness mode. Store shelves are stripped of bread, water and milk. (It's the same if snow is predicted in the winter.) I don't quite understand this because having been a native Californian my experience in natural disasters was limited to those things one cannot predict: brush fires and earthquakes. Both happen so fast, one doesn't have time to think about what to do. In California, one just sleeps fully clothed with wallet and cell phone in hand along with car keys and extra batteries in a hip pocket! I have learned though. OH MY, have I learned!!! When in the South do as Southerners do. Get yourself to the grocery store and buy everything off the shelves, girl.
A couple of days ago, I decided that with the projections for a major hurricane to hit our area in 6 days, maybe I should send Skip out to look for some supplies. Well, obviously I wasn't the only one thinking that way. In fact, the entire county seems to have been of one mind and the shelves had already been stripped bare. Sadly, the
one thing that we REALLY needed was nowhere to be found. We needed a generator. This was not a convenience but a necessity if we lost power because our sump pump would stop running and (as we experienced in the last hurricane) our basement flooded.
So...Skip went out looking in three or four surrounding counties to see if he could find a generator for the sump pump. We weren't looking for anything special. Really, anything would do. Since Skip was running around on this errand --
ALL DAY!!!--I was stuck dealing with my mother without respite. She was in a particularly zombie-like mood wandering to and fro. I was trying to get some work done, but between Mom's meanderings, Skip's phone calls asking me to check various websites for availability of the elusive generators, and the oppressive heat, I was not in the best of moods. By evening, we finally resolved the generator problem when we found one in Charlotte (three hours drive from here). However, with our daughter and son-in-law living in Charlotte, we could have them pick it up for us and deliver since our son-in-law was meeting Skip at a halfway point between here and Charlotte so Skip could drive our granddaughter, Julie to a special dance lesson in Raleigh. Don't even begin to ask me about how we worked that one out and how many phone calls it took for us to figure out that Julie could leave school and make it in time to take a lesson from a choreographer who is well-known in the dance world...an opportunity that just could not be missed!
That night when we finally settled down after dinner and decided to rent a movie to relax and enjoy after putting Mom to bed. We were just getting into the movie when we heard a blood curdling scream. I realized it was coming over the monitor system.
"That's Mom!" I shouted, getting up to run to her room. Before I reached the door I heard her crying out, "God help me." Now I KNEW something was wrong. I ran into her room preparing myself for whatever disaster awaited me. Mom was sitting on her bed, eyes wide as saucers, telling me that someone was screaming at her. "That was YOU," I announced.
"No, no. Someone was screaming and telling me to take it off the mungo muddle..." Her aphasia had kicked in so I have no idea what she was saying after that. I finally convinced her that she was having a bad dream, rubbed her back and calmed her down enough to get her back to sleep. I was about to step back out of her room and return to the movie when she popped her head up, looking like something was terribly wrong.
"What's the matter, Mom?" I asked. There was no response. I came closer understanding that she had difficulty hearing me. "Mom? Is something wrong?" I asked two more times before she replied.
"I have to go to the bathroom," she told me getting up.
I helped her to the bathroom waiting patiently while she moved slower than a snail. When she finished and opened the door I noticed that her wet diapers were placed on the sink and there was a puddle on the floor. The toilet was the only thing she didn't use. "Clean up on aisle five!" I announced over the monitor and Skip came running up with the wet mop. The movie would have to wait another 15 minutes.
That brings me to my reason for writing this today. I had a live webcast I was invited to do today as a guest author. The last time I did something like this I was invited on a podcast and my internet connection was very poor. We kept disconnecting and the podcast was cancelled. I was frustrated and angry when my husband explained that my location I chose for the interview was a weak location. Therefore, I tested the webcast connection and location the week prior to the live show to make sure I had a perfect connection, location, lighting, etc. I told everyone that I was doing this so not to call me during that time. Just to be safe and to avoid those pesky robo calls that occur with regularity every 20 minutes or so, I turned all of the phone ringers on mute. Then, I told Skip that we should have lunch early just to make sure that there would be no noise coming from the kitchen during the show. I got my lap top set up in the library, set my chair at the perfect angle, adjusted the lighting and even put a note on the front door saying, 'DO NOT DISTURB. BROADCAST IN PROGRESS.' I needed to advise our son, who often comes downstairs from his apartment to say 'Hello', but I was out of time so I told Skip to text him while I grabbed a sip of lemon water and returned to my laptop.
With all of the preparation, one would think that nothing could go wrong. Au contraire. This is MY life we're talking about.
About one minute before going live, my mother's elder monitor began to beep loudly. Having been told that the video broadcasting equipment was very sensitive to the slightest sound, I made the decision to take a nose dive to turn the interrupting speaker off. Only, I couldn't see how to do that so I unplugged it and threw it across the room returning to my seat just in time, adjusting my hair, my lipstick and my blouse in time to smile broadly and greet the hostess online. Whew! The guest panel was introduced with not a moment to spare. As the hostess asked each of us to introduce ourselves I noticed that my screen froze, I hurried to refresh the url and was fortunate to make it back in time for her to get to me. I was dividing my attention between the introductory comments and my intermittent Internet connection. When a question was asked of the panel, I couldn't wait to answer but as I spoke, once again the screen froze, and this time there was no recovery. My Internet was down. I had to exit and try again. It took much longer than the first time and when I returned the panel had moved on. The hostess very kindly returned to me to get my response and I was able to complete my thought but not without being distracted. I had lost my train of thought in the moment of panic and didn't recover as well as I would've liked. Being used to my frantic days, I have learned to think quickly and found something intelligible to say. We moved on to another subject and suddenly, in the background my phone in the kitchen rang. What?! I had turned all the ringers off. How could that happen. Skip was outside and had to run in to catch the phone on the second ring. I heard his voice in the background and quickly put my laptop on mute. What else could go wrong? I didn't have to wait too long. Suddenly the door swung open from the screened porch. Mom came barreling inside complaining that she felt like she was going to throw up. She was followed by our dog who wanted to play and my husband who was trying to maintain order and silence. I tried to ignore them and continue listening to the discussion hoping to be able to keep my wits about me in view of the pandemonium in the other room. A question was asked but I missed it because my computer froze. The hostess asked me when I reappeared if I had a comment. (About what? Uh...um...'NO'). All in all my computer froze five times and I tried to follow the show as best I could, but felt kind of like a blind person in a paint store. The final straw was when the side door opened and our son came downstairs looking for all of us. He wandered around the kitchen, then went back upstairs to the attached apartment closing the door noisily. (UGH). A little while later, his girlfriend started her car just under the library window then stopped, went back inside, closing the side door, then reopening and returning to her car. (Later, I found out that her car was not acting right and they had called a tow truck.) There was more door slamming and then silence just as the hostess was saying goodbye and thanking her guests. I mutely waived goodbye smiling broadly and exited the show. Taking a deep breath I looked for Skip.
"How'd it go?" he asked innocently.
"How'd it go? HOW'D IT GO?!
OH MY GOD!!!" I yelled. "I live in a mad house, that's how it went."
Skip looked hurt. "I'm sorry about the phone."
"...And Mom, and Kira, and the doors, and Bill coming in. I thought that you texted him."
"You said you were putting up a sign," he answered defensively.
I rolled my eyes. What was the point of arguing that I told him to text our son. Instead I told him about the Internet issues.
"Well that's not the strongest signal in the library," he answered.
"It was fine last week," I reminded him.
"Well, that's because all of us weren't at home and on the Internet at the same time." It turned out that Skip was watching the weather reports, Bill was up in his apartment on the Internet and there were probably at least three devices accessing the Internet as well. My eyes were bugging out and my head was exploding as I tried to take in this last bit of information. To make matters worse, Skip had to leave to go pick up our granddaughter and didn't have time to talk or to make me feel better. Skip left the room to move on to his next task leaving me with my mother who decided that going in and out of the house leaving the door open each time was how she wanted to fill the rest of the afternoon. I resigned myself to the fact that my life is destined to be this way...crazy, funny (if you choose to laugh) and certainly nothing boring about it!
Skip just announced that our air conditioner has stopped working. We have a call in to the air conditioner people but I won't be answering the phone. I will be the crazy woman sitting in the padded cell laughing maniacally.
