When I was in my late 20s, I befriended a woman in her early 40s who was in my aerobics class at the gym I frequented at the time. I noticed her because of her perfect posture, postural alignment being something we physios can’t help but observe. When she jumped in class, it was a head higher than anyone else and, like me, she’d do an extra half hour of cardio on the stair master after class.
One time, we ended up side by side on the stair masters and I asked her if by any chance she was a dancer. She told me she used to dance for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. Having grown up with a love of ballet, obsessed with Rudolf Nureyev and his ilk, I was gobsmacked. We became good friends and she was an important person in my life through the 1990s.
My friend had a great sense of fashion and style whether it came to hair, make-up or clothing. Nothing was ever overdone. Rather, she would make a statement through a great haircut, a bright coloured lipstick, glasses that framed her face beautifully or a strategically placed accessory.
I remember one piece of advice she gave me that has always stuck with me, a sort of forewarning. She said, « The older you are, the bigger and louder your accessories should be, to distract from the parts that are fading. »
Fast forward thirty-seven years and my parts are definitely fading. The thing is, now that I have arrived at this point, I don’t really care. I am quite happy to blend into the background and not be noticed. I have grown out my grey and I no longer wear make-up or jewelry. I am honoured to wear my age like a well-earned badge. It is truly liberating to let the small stuff go and make space for the things that really matter to me in my senior years. Yes, the lines are blurring but the pressure is off.
That being said, if there is one big and loud accessory I am happy to wear, it is my extroverted, larger than life husband. Who needs a designer pocket book when you have someone next to you willing to carry your heavy camera bag.
Neil Young was wrong. It isn’t better to burn out than it is to fade away.
My favourite accessory.
Click here to listen to Neil Young’s My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue).
I am hosting Christmas dinner this year. There will be a total of eight people around a table equipped for three.
How does someone who doesn’t cook and who suffers from social anxiety cope with this ?
Apart from finding a local caterer to supply the turkey dinner and trimmings, she doesn’t.
Instead, she self-medicates by ordering a mish-mash of functional dinner accoutrements from Etsy.
Happily, even though I ordered all these items separately from different sellers, they have all arrived today, in good-mannerly fashion, a symphonic coming together of accessories. I feel like a giddy foodie in front of a cheese platter.
The gravy boat arrived first. It is vintage Pyrex and it is a-dor-able. I won’t be making the gravy but I can certainly imagine the oohs and ahhs as I pass this cutie around.
The cutest gravy boat ever.
Next to arrive was the ceramic, hand-made butter dish. The only better would be if I churned my own butter. I can team that with the nice vintage butter knife I took from my childhood home just before it was sold.
The handmade ceramic butter dishYe olde butter knife
Lastly, my hand-made, block-print Moroccan table cloth arrived and it’s a beauty. Doesn’t it go nicely with the gravy boat?
Gold Christmas crackers or green?
Mission accomplished, I am suitably distracted. I proudly display my wares to my husband.
Then, a creeping doubt enters my head, a precursor to the inevitable, imaginary catastrophe. I say it out loud: « Does cranberry stain? » My husband shrugs, « I dunno. Does gravy? »
I google the cranberry stain hack first. The instructions are a page long. Egad, it will take longer to remove the cranberry juice from my lovely Moroccan table cloth than it would take to make the entire Christmas dinner.
I look up how to remove gravy next. Gravy has its own category but is also under the category of grease stains. Doesn’t matter how it’s classified, in my head I read: category five hurricane—abort!
« Since grease and oil stains are not water soluble, simply washing is not going to remove butter, gravy, and oil stains. Apply either a dry powder (baking soda, cornstarch, or flour) or spray WD-40 to the soiled area and allow to sit for an hour. This allows for the grease or oil to be absorbed. Next, brush off the powder and soak the stained area in a bowl with hot water and dish liquid for an hour before rinsing. Allow the affected area to dry out and then inspect to see if the stain has come out. If not, repeat the process. »
(For a complete list of how-tos for tablecloth stains, click here.)
I’m starting to reconfigure the place settings in my head. Maybe a nice vinyl table cloth would work just as well. I can still use the gravy boat and the butter dish but I would save my new table cloth for a low-fat, neutral-coloured dinner party. Catastrophe averted. Phew!
« I know you will love this writer, if you don’t know her already. This is her most recent blog, but I’d start at the beginning if i were you. »
I clicked on the link he provided and ended up at Jess Pan’s blog, It’ll Be Fun, They Said …
Turns out I do know this writer. In fact I read her book, Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously, when it was first released sometime in 2019. My friend knows me well!
I could totally relate to her struggles with introversion, being one of those people who high fives her extroverted husband when plans get cancelled. My idea of a perfect day is staying home in my jammies with nowhere to go and no one to see.
That being said, I frequently step outside my comfort zone, sometimes way outside, in order to keep my social network fed and keep my social skills intact and keep connected with my community.
There are plenty of studies that suggest maintaining social connections as we age can prevent cognitive decline as well as other aging-related consequences.
On August 8th of last year, my husband and I were on our way back home after visiting my mum in hospital where she was recovering from surgery after breaking her hip. There was a severe rainstorm happening that evening and my low to the ground Hyundai Elantra stalled as my husband tried to gun it through a flooded intersection. The car quickly filled up with water, up to the seats, and we could not open the doors, nor the windows to get out.
After five minutes of intense panic watching the water level in the car rise, the rain stopped and we were able to get out.
It took us about six hours to get a tow truck. I waited by the car while my husband got a lift with my son’s girlfriend back home to pick up his car.
The one thing that struck me is that I couldn’t think of a single person in our réseau, friend or family, that I would feel comfortable calling for help apart from my son (who doesn’t drive) and his girlfriend.
I asked myself if I was reaping what I sow?
From that moment on I vowed to make more of an effort to socialize, try new experiences, keep friends and make new ones, similar to Jessica Pan’s year of trying to live like an extrovert. I resolved to automatically say yes to all invitations, barring conflicting schedules or previous engagements, and to join some clubs.
Already a member of a community bookclub, I asked to join my work bookclub comprised of a small group of ladies I happen to be very fond of. I started saying yes to invitations for lunch and coffee dates. I even initiated some of those invitations. I joined a local camera club, signed up for photography workshops and asked to participate in a photography exhibition my mentor was organizing. I started weekly online guitar lessons. Just last week, I signed up for a third bookclub at our local library.
Twenty months in, I took inventory and asked myself if I was feeling more connected socially, if I was getting the hang of this extroversion kick. The short answer: no. I am exactly the same person I was sitting in my car with the water level rising wondering who I could call for help, with one small exception: I am exhausted from all the socializing.
Today our electrician Justin is coming over to update our electrical panel. We met him during an inconvenient and very expensive week of appliance deaths: first our dryer, soon followed by the television. When our dryer broke, something blew in our electrical panel, an issue beyond house repairs 101.
Enter Justin who fixed the problem in one minute flat but told us that our 1964 electrical system was no longer capable of supporting our current (pun intended) electrical needs and that if we didn’t modernize it, our house could burn down. That was all I needed to hear to give him the go-ahead.
I am a natural catastrophizer, addicted to the high of things working out despite my imaging the worse case scenario. My husband, on the other hand, is the polar opposite to me, never thinking (or planning for) beyond the present moment. He lives in a cozy bubble labeled: here and now, a lovely place to be, except for those times he runs out of gas on the highway.
If you were to ask me what my worst fears are I would list them as follows: being lifted up and away by a bunch of helium balloons, explosions (I blame this on my brother’s cap gun going off near my head when we were kids), the house on fire (I’ve already set my hair on fire), being hit by rubber bands (thanks again to darling brother), and receiving a shock of the electrical kind (I wear oven mitts to turn the light switches on and off during the dry, winter months). I also have a fear of lighting matches or lighters. I can manage those long-handled lighters, however, that click on, like a gun.
The electrician is here now and he’s just called my husband down to the basement. I am in full catastrophe mode as I write this, imagining an explosive withdrawal from my bank account or that we may have to dig a trough from the basement out into the garden to access some obscure wire. If not accessing it may cause a fire, I will have to give him the go-ahead.
UPDATE: the bad news is that we cannot upgrade our electrical box sufficiently to plug in an e-car. For that kind of work, we would have to dig up the uni-stone patio just outside the basement window adjacent to the electrical box. Not a major catastrophe, but something to consider as we phase out gas-running cars.
The good news is that NOT digging up the patio will not precipitate a neighborhood big bang.
I am currently reading Margaret Atwood’s latest tome: Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, and absolutely loving it. The details she offers in this autobiography are mind-boggling considering I barely remember what I did on the weekend.
For example, she recalls her high school home economics classes including her experience directing and acting in a home economics opera that starred: Orlon, Nylon and Dacron. Her brilliance was evident even then.
In another unrelated passage she is sixteen years old and crossing the school football field on her way home when she has an epiphany that she will become a writer. But it’s not the becoming a writer part that struck me, perhaps because that is obvious at this point. Rather, it is the description of the dress she is wearing, one that she made herself, that I find so impressive: « It was pink. It had a princess line, cap sleeves and a shirred bodice decorated with an ornamental gold button. » Cue wistful sigh …
I am fairly certain I took home-economics in high school, sometime in the mid-70s. Or did I? Apart from hemming slacks or sewing on a button, I haven’t got a clue how to sew. Did we learn in class? If we did, I didn’t retain anything. I definitely didn’t learn how to cook or darn a sock or grocery shop for a family.
I do remember one assignment where we had to make a model kitchen. I worked so hard on that project, quite unlike me, not being very artsy in those days, and made an exact replica of my parents’ kitchen, right down to the last detail. To my disappointment, I promptly lost two points, scoring 48/50 (I remember that detail) because I placed the fridge next to the oven. « That makes no sense. », the teacher argued when I explained I had used the family kitchen as a model. My parents obviously took this criticism seriously and moved the oven, now combined with the stove, a cupboard’s length away from the fridge when they renovated their kitchen in 1996.
Our updated/still outdated, family kitchen.
If there was one skill I took away from home-ec class, it was how to measure accurately. I remember the teacher instructing us to get down to eye level and to check for the bevel in the liquid. An eye-level bevel, if you prefer. It was the bevel, or slight dip in the liquid, that had to line up with the desired line on the measuring cup. The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes a bevel as 1. : the angle that one surface or line makes with another when they are not at right angles. 2. : the slant of a bevel.
Is the bevel lined up?
Liquid or solid, I have been a measuring perfectionist ever since, at least when it comes to baking, driving everyone around me crazy with my insistence that a third cup of flour cannot be eyeballed in a container meant to measure a quarter cup or even one cup. Instructions for heaping amounts makes me anxious. Is your heap subjectively the same size as mine? Mixing shortbread until crumbly begs clarification for how does one measure crumbly? Separating eggs? Pass me the egg separator.
Cooking is art but baking is pure chemistry. Mess with the ingredients and you will fail and your souffle may fall. I bake only tried and true recipes designed to succeed and to feed many. Not too many ingredients, no vague instructions, and preferably measurements that are not metric.
My mother, notorious for using an old plastic cup devoid of increments for all her baking, was a poor model.
My husband guesstimates too, but not when I am supervising. Oh, and he never uses a timer either, preferring his baking (and toast) in the form of burnt offerings.
Truly, I owe all my baking skills, and by extension probably my chemistry marks, to my high school home economics class. Perhaps if I hadn’t become fixed on the bevel, I would also be a whiz at hosting dinner parties.
Circling back to Margaret Atwood, she who can not only sew a dress and put on an opera, but who can also start a fire, handle a snake and write a whole bunch of wonderful books, not to mention poetry. Did her career start with home economics? Should I have paid more attention in class? If I had, would I have a novel under my belt by now?
Does anyone remember what home economics was all about in the 70s? Do they still teach those skills in school?
Margaret Atwood also credits Brownies with teaching her life skills. I got my baking badge in Brownies, (or was it Girl Guides?), making hot cross buns. I’d never eaten hot cross buns before. The candied fruit made me nauseous when I tasted the end result. To this day, the thought of candied fruit makes me ill. On the plus side, I learned the Lord’s Prayer by heart thanks to Brownies and so don’t feel too left out during Christian ceremonies.
The other night Ian was helping me with some baking and I handed him the 3/4 measuring cup instead of the one cup. It was a test. Thankfully, he realized his error and cleverly added another 1/4 cup of flour to the mix.
I need a little person’s kitchen with lower counters. I am tired of standing on a stool to bake. My childhood dream that never came true was to get an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas. I looked them up the other day and the modern version looks nothing like the oven in my home-ec model kitchen project. ☹️
I have decided to do a month of daily blog entries, each a minimum of 150 words. The reasoning for the word limit is twofold: 1. To not place too much pressure on my low-libido creativity. 2. To lower expectations of the reader.
Visiting my mother at her senior’s residence this past weekend, I quizzed her on her trustworthiness with respect to the chocolate adventure calendar I ordered her from Purdys, a British Colombia confectionary success story akin to Laura Secords. That calendar is sold out, possibly due to it being Day 1 of the countdown, but they do have a Braille version that is still available. I wonder if they are counting on patrons with low vision not being able to read the past due date on the little boxes?
Getting back to my mother’s interrogation, I reminded her that I had bought her an advent calendar last year and that she had completely disrespected the order of things. Not only did she consume the chocolates in her calendar in a willy-nilly manner, opening random windows instead of following the dates, but she also managed to eat all the chocolates in the space of five days versus twenty-five. By the time she was done, the calendar was a mere vestige of its former glory, a massacre of cardboard and containers ripped from their assigned slots.
Initially, she promised to obey the unwritten advent calendar rules. This after I reminded her that she used to collectively punish us kids for stealing chocolates without permission from the Christmas tree. (Seriously folks, what reasonable parent dangles chocolates in front of children then tells them they can’t have any? It was a cruel form of torture.) Then she asked me how she would know what day of the month it was.
That was a reality check for me. My mother has cognitive impairment and Parkinson’s, a double whammy. She is no longer oriented to time. At least that is what I tell myself when she refers to me as her mother. It can’t possibly be that she thinks I am old enough to be her mother, right?
I texted my sister for advice. She reminded me that my mother was on a diabetic diet during a recent hospitalization for a UTI. The diagnosis has been an elusive one over the years. Is she or isn’t she? She definitely has a sweet tooth and she has clearly has lost her sense of proportion. I would have to make the decision for her. No chocolate advent calendar this year, probably ever.
What I find interesting, is my tendency to please people through food. This desire to feed people and make them happy even though I don’t cook and have myself cut out sugar from my lifestyle because of a strong history of diabetes in the family. I do bake though much less than I used to. And I do enjoy very dark chocolate which satisfies the sweet tooth without all the sugar.
I am very much my father’s daughter. He was the ultimate food pusher, and a pushover himself when it came to refusing seconds. Being East Indian and Sikh, it was natural for him to want to share his table. We were reminded regularly of the starving kids in Africa (starving kids in India didn’t have the same impact in our house).
The advent calendar will go to my son, a model of control and reason. A kid whose Halloween candy would last him well past Christmas. If I didn’t know better, I would suspect we did not share the same DNA, certainly not the same sweet tooth.
As for my mother, she is quite happy with a friendly visit that doesn’t involve treats. Her residence serves dessert after lunch and supper, with tea and cookie breaks twice a day, enough to satisfy her sweet tooth.
I think my first entry is way past 150 words. So much for self control. LOL
When my son first introduced us to his girlfriend, Isa, two years ago, I remarked to my husband that there was a shift in the usual thrum of our household, normally a backdrop of whistling birds, whining dogs, Neil Young and our trusty Rabbit Air purifier.
I have one son from my first marriage, an only child who was frequently lonely growing up, who only stopped asking for a sibling when it was clear it just wasn’t going to happen. He takes up the least amount of real estate in a dwelling where the rest of its inhabitants frequently jostle for space on the podium.
Enter Isa; queue joy, laughter and vitality. Electricity buzzing, fingertips tingling.
Sean & Isa
You know that saying, you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone. Well, we didn’t know what was missing until it entered the house.
Sean has dyspraxia. The official diagnosis is Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). The way I explain it to him is that the muscles aren’t able to hear the messages from the brain properly.
Of course, there is more to it than that but that is the simplified explanation. Not only does it make the undertaking of new tasks challenging, it requires a lot more energy to complete those tasks, quickly burning through the bank of energy chips at any given moment.
This isn’t an excuse in life but it is an explanation.
For some reason, my son is inordinately hard on himself when he doesn’t meet his own expectations. He resists the notion that rather than it being a question of effort or ability, it is an energy management problem. It is like trying to run a marathon depleted, with the muscles not hearing the messages properly. At a certain point, he needs to recharge and/or regroup.
Learning strategies and acquiring new skills takes time. But sometimes in order to reach a destination in a reasonable amount of time or to meet a deadline, he needs to adapt or at the very least accept that this is his best effort under the circumstances, that perseverance can be exhausting and resilience can coexist with short-cuts.
Sean doesn’t drive yet. He will get there in his own time, at his own pace. Isa is fiercely independent, shares a car with her sister and owns a scooter. Though they both use public transit wherever possible, Isa does all the driving otherwise, and she never complains about it.
Let me tell you about Isa’s act of kindness when she picks up or drops off my son on her scooter, observed from my perch by the living room window, nestled in my reading chair.
Upon arrival, she texts Sean then dismounts the scooter, takes out the spare helmet from the storage compartment and when he emerges, lovingly attaches it for him, all the while making eye contact. There is always a long hug before and after the helmet adjustments, then a few words exchanged before they are off. She does the same thing when she drops him off.
A long hello and a long goodbye over a helmet ritual. Every single time.
I absolutely love her for this, for her generosity and compassion, for this simple fine motor act of kindness to spare my son the energy and effort it would take to manage the helmet straps himself. Energy conservation in a loving gesture.
I feel gratitude every time I witness this ritual. I want her to know that her small act makes a huge difference to Sean and to me.
I’ve had this Amana fridge since I first moved out of my parents’ house in 1988. At the time, I paid $400 each for four appliances that came with the flat: fridge, stove, washer and drier.
To my knowledge, the only appliance of that set to actually conk out over time was the washing machine. I know this because I took it with me when I eventually moved out.
The apartment came fitted with a brand new dish washer that I used for the first time around 1994. It was only used then because the colleagues I’d invited over for dinner insisted, possibly to get out of helping me clean up. The event was formally dubbed “Dishwasher Inauguration”, complete with celebratory banners and photos of me loading the dirty dishes into the racks with a stupid grin on my face.
As best laid plans often go, the dish washer didn’t work at first; turns out it wasn’t actually connected to any water supply, a technicality my then boyfriend sorted out for me afterwards.
I rarely used it after that, even with everyone cheering me on. I don’t think I owned enough plates to fill it up, at least not until my first husband moved in sometime in 1998.
When ex-husband and I bought a house in 2001, we took all the appliances with us, except for the stove and dishwasher, because the new house came with those.
To be clear, we didn’t buy a house so that we could have more space to entertain. We bought it to accommodate our then expanding fur family that included two pugs and two cats
Fast forward to 2025. I now share that same house with a new husband, a twenty-one year old son, three senior lap dogs (all rescues) and four birds.
The washer and drier are long gone, exchanged for sleeker, stacking models. The dishwasher that came with the house never worked in the first place and rather than replace it, we use to store canned goods (I really don’t mind hand washing dishes). As for the stove, only half of the elements work. Think of it as kitchen camping.
Good thing I don’t cook. I also don’t entertain, unless you consider the occasional witty repartee or pithy observation over tea/coffee/me and a heartfelt chat to be a good enough reason to stop by. We do host music rehearsalsand are now open for pit stops since we redid our powder room and changed our front door to a bright and welcoming yellow model that actually opens. No more yoo-hooing from the side door inviting guests to enter through the mud room entrance. I will however be buying a mat that reads “Goodbye” to counter any misconception that this is a party hub.
Welcome to the Yellow Door of the West. You may stay for coffee only.The new restroom which is always clean.
Back to the fridge. It simply keeps running, through wear and tear, neglect, abuse even.
We can’t wheel it out to clean behind it because apparently back in the 80s, you only cleaned behind your fridge when you moved or died, whichever came first.
I also can’t remove the drawing my son made in grade school because the tape I used to stick it on the freezer door has merged with the glass panel behind it.
The worst thing about this fridge is that I can’t use any of our vacation magnets to stick family photos and reminders on the front. Instead these items have been relegated to the narrow panels of magnetized fridge parts visible from the side. It’s simply not right.
I asked my son to help me measure the dimensions of the space because today the fridge is getting on my nerves and I am determined to clean behind it before I die, or at least before my next dinner party. I joked with my son that it is time to change the artwork on the front. He solemnly agreed.
If I lived alone, I would fill the space with a mini retro-coloured Smeg fridge in a happy colour like orange or lime green. Just big enough to hold my coffee cream and ready to heat microwave dinners. But I don’t live alone so I will have to buy a fridge large enough to accommodate a family of three humans, three dogs, four birds and the occasional guest.
I know I will regret this. They simply don’t make them like they used to. Something in between dispensable and indestructible will do. In the meantime, I am open to suggestions for recommended models. The only criteria are wheels.
I am trying to be a responsible parent and get my affairs in order because sometimes shit happens and I had my son late in life and he is an only child.
Call notary to make an appointment to revise Last will & Testament. Message left on voice box. ✅
Call Indian High Commision in Ottawa to obtain proper birth certificate. I left a message months ago and never heard back. Second message left after calling back several times and pressing options 1-9 in turn only to end up at the same generalized voice-box. ✅
Call funeral home to discuss cheapest and simplest body disposal plan. Get side-tracked googling « how to donate your body to science in Montreal ». Apparently there are criteria for this, folks, and they won’t accept bodies that are too tall or too heavy or with crooked limbs. It also excludes you from being an organ donor. Oh, and no autopsied bodies either. ❎
Looks like I will have to reschedule the death planning for another day. 🙄
I did ask my son if he had a preference, like would he be willing to carry my remains to Kiratpur in the Punjab (the Sikh equivalence to the Ganges for Hindus) and maybe take my dad’s remains which are languishing in my sibling’s closet while he’s at it? He looked vaguely horrified at this before shrugging uncomfortably.
I don’t blame him. I mean, who thinks about death planning at twenty-one? I would like his input though, since I won’t be around for consultation after the fact.
After my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis in 1988, my parents got seriously organized and set up a payment plan for their respective cremations and burial site. That being said, it was still a circus, right down to the funeral home calling me the first day of visitation after my dad died to tell me the urn they paid for was no longer in stock and could I come down and chose another one. We settled on a white marble urn, very Taj Mahal. To clarify, half of my dad is at the cemetery and the other half is waiting to be returned to the motherland.
Would love some input if you’d care to share your thoughts and experiences on estate planning.
I took my 89 year mother to the dental hygienist today, anticipating some kind of fall-out, considering recommendations made last visit have not been followed. My mother has dementia and Parkinson’s disease and has been living in a private residence for the past two years plus eight months. As for her cognitive status, I would describe her as pleasantly confused with poor short term memory. Most days she is not oriented to time. An anxious person by nature, she gets particularly worked up if she has a medical appointment that day, refusing to eat breakfast (or lunch), declining a shower and calling me repeatedly to verify what time I will be picking her up.
After a half hour of waiting room respite reading my book, the hygienist called me in to the room at my mother’s request (or as she put it later on in the car, the girl was going on and on and I didn’t understand anything she was telling me). To summarize, a large filling had falling out during the cleaning and the tooth had to be extracted. Then there were the expected admonishments: plaque and tartar build-up, she needs to floss and brush better, can someone assist her? She has Parkinson’s, I explained, and she doesn’t remember all these steps. I don’t live with her, the staff at the residence do their best helping the clients who need it with basic morning and evening routines. My mother, listening to us talk over her, interjected, « Just pull them all out. It’s less trouble. »
I think my mother is getting upset, I said. The hygienist apologized. No need, I said. I appreciate your professional recommendation but I simply don’t have a resource to help with daily dental care except to remind her when I visit. I can also bring her to see you more often and I can hire the dental hygiene resource that visits the residence.
I am semi-retired and most if not all my days off are spent either visiting my mother (my sister, who works full-time, visits on the days I am working), taking her to appointments, organizing family restaurant meals or taking care of her finances. The residence she lives in is fabulous. I hand-picked it for her based on the fact that it has been family run for years, has stability of staff and gives wonderful care. There are visiting dogs, resident birds, guest chickens in the summer. There is a recreation therapist extraordinaire, live music, and a beautiful garden with a koi pond.
She gets her hair done every two weeks in the hair salon in the basement, regular foot care, a specialized, visiting massage therapist for her lymphedema (a complication from radiation post excision of a sarcoma tumour). She has a devoted albeit paid companion, Fallon, who visits four mornings a week for three hours at a time to keep her company, go for walks and do puzzles with. Fallon was recommended by the residence and has been an absolute godsend, a salve for my mother’s loneliness, a life-saver when my mother broke her hip last year and was hospitalized for seven weeks. Fallon sat with her in the hospital when we could not be there.
In the elevator on the way down, my mother apologized for not taking better care of her teeth. I recognized the emotion she was feeling: it was shame and that made me angry because it was completely unwarranted. I joked that I also feel badly every time I have a dental appointment, being scolded for not flossing the right way, or the constant reminders that the tooth with the very large filling may have to be pulled because they can’t keep filling the cracks. Honestly, I was so sick of the negative feedback, so anxious every time I had an upcoming appointment (I’m sorry but dental hygiene fricken hurts!), that I decided to be extra vigilant in my dental care between visits. After years of bad press, I have had two excellent reviews in a row. Hurrah!
With respect to my mother’s care, it took me a while to accept that I am not responsible for her happiness, I can only make sure her needs are being met. She is the sweetest, kindest, most caring person you will ever meet, but she is also very dependent on her children for solace. Trying to fulfill this emotional neediness is like trying to fill a bottomless cup. I have learned to outsource where I can. We are fortunate that my father left enough funds to provide her with resources. That is what I will do with respect to her dental care. The residence has agreed to remind her to follow her routine at night. That being said, the Parkinson’s affects her coordination and I know it will not be enough. I have booked another appointment with the dental hygienist in three months and will contact the visiting hygienist to see what her availability is. That will have to be enough. Her tooth extraction is booked for September. I will deal with that when the time comes.
The elevator at the dentist’s office is mirrored. On the way down with my mother, I was struck by my reflection standing next to my mother’s. Twenty-seven years apart and we looked like contemporaries in that mirror. It was probably my state of mind at the time. We look alike, my mother and I, except for our colouring. She is fair with blue-grey eyes, like the ocean an admirer once noted, with beautiful, wavy, white hair. Next to her, I looked like someone’s chubby Indian Aunty, puffy-face and disgruntled, carrying her goodie bag from the dentist that contained a new toothbrush and floss.
Every once in a while, my mother calls me to ask me where the other Sharon is. «You mean the nice one? She’s long gone! », I answer wickedly.
You need to find the lighter side of dementia to survive it as a caregiver, always respectfully, of course. I don’t infantilise and I don’t lie. Thankfully, my mother’s sense of humour is intact and she always laughs at my response.
I am obsessed by the Tiny Chef Show, a recently cancelled Nickelodeon show I knew nothing about until I happened to come across this video on social media. Here I am, a grown-ass Indian Aunty, watching video clips of the show to cheer me up. I was so discouraged after today’s dental visit, I practiced some retail therapy and pre-ordered a Tiny Chef plushy that talks and a mug with Tiny Chef’s picture on one side and the words, « I’m Blokay » on the other. Okay, blokay … I know I have a problem folks buying stuffed toys at this age and stage, counterintuitive to the decluttering progress I’ve been making, but Tiny Chef makes me feel better, so there. Besides, I’m still planning to floss tonight and use my special dental pick to massage the gums between my teeth.
bogeyandruby 