It's 5 AM: Do You know Where Your Mother Is?

I can hear it ringing in my ears, "It's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?"  It was a Public Service Announcement that used to play on TV.  Nowadays, we are so connected electronically that we know where EVERYONE is all the time!  However, at 5 AM I have no desire to know what, where or who is anywhere.  All I want to do is sleep.  Unfortunately, my mother often has other plans.  This morning, for example, I was jarred out of a wonderful dream by a cacophony upstairs broadcasting across the monitor.  Mom was clanking and banging in the most unusual way prompting Skip to run upstairs to see what all the ruckus was about.  Evidently Mom thought that it was a fine time to scrub her disposable adult diapers with a toothbrush..  "Now where is that thing?"  She rifled through her cosmetics box, the drawers in the bathroom, and myriad items situated on her vanity.  Obviously, the toothbrush was not easily found but alas, she finally discovered its whereabouts and began her washer-woman scrubbing technique with some soap and water.  Swoosh, swoosh, back and forth.

"What the heck is going on upstairs?" I asked sleepily when Skip returned.
His muffled response displayed how annoyed he was.  "Oh...she's scrubbing her diapers..." Then he mumbled something else and crawled back under the covers.  I couldn't understand what he was saying and asked for more of an explanation.  Once he told me, I thought about what Mom had been doing and then my brain got busy thinking...thinking about Mom, thinking about what I had been dreaming, thinking about what I needed to do once I got up, what I had forgotten to do the day before.  I was now wide awake.  There was no way sleep would return to me.

When I finally made the decision to get up a half hour later, I was resigned to the fact that my day would start early in a productive flurry of work.  "I'll check my emails, and be able to reply in peace and quiet without the morning news blaring in the background," I told myself. However, I soon discovered that NOBODY writes me emails at 5:30 AM!   I was stuck staring at a blank screen.  "Aha!" I thought.  I'll begin reading my next book for book club, but I hadn't bought the book yet and when I went searching for the ebook to download, I was disappointed to see that it was far more expensive than most ebooks.  "Nope!  I'm not paying that much for a book that I might not even enjoy. I'll get it from the library," I told myself. Okay then...no book, no email, and noise still coming from upstairs.  

I'm usually so busy that I complain that I never have a moment for myself but now, I had a couple of hours before the day would start and I didn't know what to do.  I found myself laughing out loud as I thought of the irony in all of this.  My thoughts were interrupted by a loud bang.  I looked at the video from my mother's room to see what Mom was up to now.  She had moved over to her dresser and was launching her walker into the side.  Bang!  Bam!  Then she wandered to the wall to park her walker and sit back down.  Bang! Bam! She pushed it into the wall. Then she got back up and walked to her closet where she must have thought by crashing into the door with her walker, it might magically open.  Bang! Bam!  

I yawned loudly and sat back down on the sofa.  It was still dark outside and if only it were quiet upstairs I thought that I might actually fall asleep; but another loud bang against a cabinet or the wall assured me that sleep was not possible.  It was now 6:00 AM and with each loud reminder, I knew EXACTLY where my mother was.  I also knew where the dog was, where my husband was and where the rest of the normal people were.  They were (mostly) in their beds sleeping and enjoying the last hour of blissful sleep.