Mothers...

My mother is a force of nature. Sometimes nature is sunshine and rainbows and sometimes it's thunderstorms and tornado warnings. This pretty much sums up my mother.

My parents as a team have faced more than most marriages could weather. They have suffered the loss of three children, two shortly after birth and one when he was a small boy. Financially they struggled to keep a roof over our heads and keep the repo men at bay. All while scraping by to find the tuition to send me to a private middle school because they felt that the public school wasn't advanced enough to keep me out of trouble. This turned out to be a really good call, but that is another blog for another day. One of their children had serious drug issues and two still live with them to this day. They are amazing people and work well as a team.

But I've always felt it was my mother that drove that team. My father supports her, adds steel to her resolve and muscle to her declarations. But my mother calls the shots. My mother is just over 5 feet tall. Bright blue eyes. Easy smile. Lovely laugh. She was the driving force in my family growing up. I can remember sitting at the dining room table as a small girl and announcing that my father might be the head of the family but my mother was the neck that turned the head. My dad said something to the effect of that being the best for my mother to think and the subject was changed. But please believe it was true.

Mom was a working mother for as long as I can remember. When she was pregnant with my sister she was a meter maid in Des Moines, IA and they did a newspaper article about her and the baby after my sister was born. I guess there was a lot of curiosity about the pregnant meter maid! While I was growing up she worked for my dad and then as the office manager for a local car wash. My brother Jeff, my sister and I all worked at the car wash as well. Because Mom decided we would, and so we did. My mother has an incredibly strong will and my father falls in with what my mother decides and they become an immovable force.

Lately things have shifted. My mother started suffering from sudden onset dementia last fall. It took months of tests and a move to a new doctor and hospital before we discovered that the underlying cause was excessive calcium production due to two different types of lymphoma. Now the good news is that she is undergoing treatment for the cancer and that is in turn treating the calcium levels so she is getting better. But a side effect of the chemo therapy is depression. When you add depression to the traces of dementia that are still around and mix that with a healthy dose of my mother's normal steam roller personality you get a really difficult mix to manage.

My mother has always had the habit of hearing what she wants to. Now, this has undoubtedly helped her through her life in raising all of us kids. But as one of those kids it's one of her most frustrating characteristics. We have had more arguments than I could ever recall from her insisting I said I would do something that I never agreed to. She probably has no idea how close I came to cutting all ties to my family in New Mexico when I was newly married. (Again, another blog for another day.) She is the queen of wishful thinking. I say she has the ability to hear a paragraph worth of words and can cut and paste in her head to make the sentence she wants to hear.

Just over the past few weeks she has decided we are coming home for Christmas, my niece and I are having a fight and have stopped speaking to each other and that she hasn't spoken to me in weeks and is going to call me and ask if I am still alive then hang up the phone. Now, we are not coming home for Christmas, my niece and I are fine and I just spoke with my mother last week.
I am going to have to call her and listen to her complain about how I never call her, and hope that she remembers this time that we spoke and try my hardest not to lose my temper. But I am not calling her today. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will remind myself that she is an old woman; who is sick and scared and not in her right mind. Tomorrow I will remember that she is a force of nature and that right now she is stuck in a fog bank that she doesn't know how to find her way out of. Tomorrow I will put on my good daughter hat and dial the number. Tomorrow.