It's Mum's Birthday tomorrow and I'm dealing with the tri-annual (Birthday/ Christmas/ Mother's Day) confusion of working out whose gift is whose. Today some flowers arrived which sound like mine from Mum's description, but mine were meant to come with a small box of chocolates. Mum was munching on chocolates this morning, but said they were from a much larger and branded box that sounds more like my Brother-in-Law's gift. Mum only remembers one delivery, so I'm left with a familiar conundrum.
As usual, I'm having to accept Mum's enthusiasm for the flowers as an implicit "Thank You". It's funny remembering my childhood and Mum standing over us to force us to write our "Thank You" letters on the day - now she doesn't even think to say the words.
2 comments:
my father has become very thoughtless in his illness. i know it's not intentional, but his selfishness with my stepmother is hard to tolerate. he can't help it, he can't help it, he can't help it, but i wonder if it was not always inside, and now has come out. it changes the man i knew into someone else.
THANK YOU for sending flowers and chocolate to your mother. you are a good son.
Aww... thank you, Belle. That's sweet of you to thank me on my Mum's behalf.
Yes, the thoughtless/selfish thing is something I struggle with daily. While my Sister wrote Mum off several years ago and won't visit her now, even then I dimly recognised that something else was going on, that the rules had changed somehow and that my Mother was now a different woman, more and more a child whose acting out should be tolerated or forgiven.
It's a little thing, but Mum's latest quirk is that she doesn't say "good bye" in phone calls any more, but just suddenly puts the phone down. It feels like a slap in the face every time, but I know it's not intended to be rude - it's just that she's lost that sensitivity to the feelings of others. Of course, the kid in me wants to complain that the strict woman who raised me isn't playing by her own rules, but the time to remonstrate with that woman is gone now, because she is gone, and it's like I've inherited a young and vulnerable child in her place.
Post a Comment