Mother ctd.

He wears grey trousers a dark; blue short-sleeved shirt, navy socks and beige loafers. On his right arm is a watch. This is the first time I’ve noticed this; most people wear a watch on their left arm. She sits on his left side, leaning into him affectionately. She looks demure in a light blue blouse and darker blue slacks, with her hands clasped between her knees. On her feet are white socks and white lace up trainers. She wears glasses. They both wear a teenage smile and you can see the love bubbling over as they sit on a rocky shore with sand and pebbles at their feet. They are on their honeymoon. I describe my mother who at this time was seventy and her new husband seventy-one. I gaze at a photo of them taken by one of her daughters.

 We were thrilled to see her happy and in love. She had had a ‘less-than-perfect’ marriage with our father for about forty years until he fell to the floor in their trailer home, dying of a heart attack. After her husband’s death she was baptized into the Baptist church. I thought this was so sad. Not the fact that she was baptized, but the fact that she felt she had to wait until her husband, was gone before she felt free do this, in the little Baptist church that she took us to when we were little girls..

 She spent a few years adjusting to being on her own. She made women friends for the first time and played rummy with them, went on bus trips and excursions. She bought her own home by the lake and began fresh, near most of her off-spring. She now lived a short drive from two of her daughters and two of her sons. Two other daughters were only an hour’s drive away. I’ve not ever heard my mother complain. Never about how hard she always worked. Never about our father, who sometimes treated her like crap and other times wrote her romantic poems. When she went through a depression at forty-five, after her hysterectomy; he dressed her up in ‘hot-pants’ and she pleased him by wearing them. I recall the two of them coming to visit me when I was pregnant with my little girl. I looked like a blimp and she looked like a ‘hot mama’. She would be called a ‘yummy mommy’ in today’s language. I felt inferior, likely not a new feeling if I am honest.

Twelve years have passed since I wrote the above.  Mother is now almost 92 and in a Nursing home.   She started her mental decline near Eighty and  now has dementia.  She does not eat on her own, needs to be fed.  All her daily functions that one has just being alive, require support.   She rarely speaks or even opens her eyes yet, she opens her mouth to eat and drink.   Life is so very unfair.  So ironic when you know that our mother worked for 35 years in a nursing home as a health care aide.   She rarely had a sick day and carried out her job with compassion and dedication.  Mother never smoked, never drank alcohol,   I wonder at the luck of the draw as we age, myself now seventy-one.