A couple weeks ago I spent a half-hour listening to dropmom bitching about everything, from her nurses who turn off the common TV just when CNN and MSNBC are getting interesting (she’s not used to going to bed before 11) to the other people in the home (she’s ever so very much more together than them, which I guess she is–she’s gimpy and they’re gimpy and too senile to tell time anymore) to my older brother who is a Republican and a Putin fan (he married Russian in more ways than one) to my younger brother who sold her iPhone and beloved Passat wagon without getting her permission (he probably did, but when she first got sick she was not more together than her neighbors). And I agreed with everything, including how her nurses and physical therapists are keeping her bed- and chair-bound because they are scared she’ll fall again, the babies. (See my own rant about my wife and her medical team–it’s like we were reading from the same script. Wife is doing better, but she won’t let anyone see her use a walker. Mom hates her walker, too.)
But I realized that my mother, instead of being the sweet lady I always thought she was, is a crank, just like me. I just never noticed. And this is not a new development; in fact we’ve been gauging her recovery by her steps back into being her old self. It’s not that we don’t have happy experiences and memories. They just don’t register as strongly as simple annoyances. It’s like my current thread about the music of the '70s; I recognize great music existed then, but I remember “Seasons in the Sun” better because it annoyed me.
But though I pretended to agree about her car because I know her greatest pleasure is pointing the car in no particular direction and driving, there is no way in Hell that 90-yr-old biddy should be behind the wheel of a car ever again. :eek:
