This is the second post in two days, if you haven’t tuned in lately. Scroll down for news of junk and more junk.
In a way, having to clear my mother’s house for sale and living in it intermittently (intermittently – who I am kidding? I’ve slept in my own bed four nights since May 3rd), has helped her because I have been on hand to assist with the transition from her own home to residential accommodation. This transition would undoubtedly be difficult for anybody. Would you like to leave your own home and go and live in an institution, no matter how posh it was? Me neither. We all have a picture of ourselves in advanced age, being in our own place, being exactly the dress size we were fifty years ago, with the boundless energy and strength of youth but just possibly, possibly on the borders of reality, enjoying slightly different television programmes and almost certainly with a slightly different hairstyle in a slightly different colour. And wider slippers. Maybe.
I believe that if you could harness the power of denial to a turbine we’d all have free central heating or aircon.
Let’s face it (momentarily – look away after this paragraph if you are of a nervous disposition) between 30 and 40 we are the best we’re going to get. We have learned some stuff and not forgotten all the other stuff, we can tie up our own shoelaces without gasping and we know how to make other people do what we want sometimes. We can even eat curry late at night. We are at the height of our powers as humans physically and need huge shopping trolleys just to keep us going. Like the majestic thingummyjig on the rolling veldt we stand in the supermarket car park surveying all around us, knowing that we dominate the tarmac. We shake our luxuriant manes as we unload family frozen chips, maxi Pampers and economy chocolate blocks and we just know the planet belongs to us.
After that, dear heart, it’s down hill all the way. It will all desert you, all the stuff you learned will unlearn itself faster than you think all the way back to the bit where you are wetting your pants, not because something was pants wettingly funny but just because your body’s forgotten how not to.
At which point you will either need help or you will wander off into the traffic and get squashed by one of the lords of creation with a mane and a boot full of Pampers and it will be a nasty end that will make the tarmac all sticky. And if you don’t want that, help it will be.
That’s the sticking point. Admitting helplessness.
So my poor mother has been on a cruise, in a nice hotel, at a conference, running a conference, transferring the Tax Office (of which she is head, to her great satisfaction by her own efforts, apparently) from Ireland to Glasgow, waiting for my father to come home, annoyed he was having an evening out with a client…………….anywhere but where she was.
And then on Friday when we knocked on the door and went in she had the television on for the first time since she arrived. She said she was glad it was a nice home and she was pleased to have a suite of rooms and she liked the carers who were kind and she thought she was lucky really but she was feeling tired and had decided not to go down to the lounges and talk to people but just to spend the afternoon in her rooms watching her television. She had finally landed in reality.
And then last night she had a mini stroke again and rang the police.
It’s a bit like the lunar module landing. It doesn’t do it first go. There’s a bit of bouncing before it’s flat down where it is. Once it has stopped bouncing it stays. Then they open the door and there they are. In reality.
The events of the past four or five years have forced me to live in reality. Anyone dealing with people with damaged brains has to confront and cope with what is actually there, no matter how upsetting.
Apart from two minutes on the scales each morning. That is me time. I do a double loop with three quarter turn, difficulty five point four and dismount, as I shake my luxurious mane, into my size zero, thin-leg diamond-encrusted jeans and go off to face the day, same as I always was, inside.
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The Jean Genie lives by her wits (she has to, no one else has any)