Living with Mother

When mum was my age she refused to look after my daughter. A toddler of 3 who needed collecting from private nursery 2 days a week, and taking to the nursery at the school she'd be attending. Mum said no, that was too much to ask. She'd seen how tired grandparents got looking after their grandchildren and 'knew what it was like' for these people she observed in cafes or walking around the park. ‘It isn’t fair to ask someone of 59 to do that,’ she'd say. It's a lot to ask of old people that they look after their grandchildren.

I’m 59. I’m all my mum has left. I look after her, working full time, and she's right. I’m tired looking after her. But the big difference is that as I look after her, she's only going to get older and needs more and more 'looking after'. Had my mum looked after my daughter, she would only have got older and needed less 'looking after'.

For the last 5 years we've WhatsApp'd every morning, so that I know she’s still alive. Every evening, on the days she doesn’t need me to do anything for her, I call her up. I ask her how her day has been, and regret asking within seconds. 

She complains about what a difficult day she’s had. I listen, patiently, thinking of the negotiations I’ve done in work, persuading people to direct scarce resources to the project I support, or finding ways to bring 12 different agencies together on a complicated and complex project, But I listen to my mum telling me how difficult it was to wait 30 minutes on the phone to speak to some customer care guru about a problem I could have sorted for her in 2 minutes flat.

 

Last week she told me about her TV. It's broken. I told her it was an input issue, and was all about the aerial, not the TV. She knew better, of course. Tonight, she tells me that her TV is sorted. It was the aerial. I don't tell her I know, it doesn't help. I have spent the last week stopping her from buying a new TV because of course she will still get the same message ‘Input error. Check your input.’ A new TV doesn’t solve a problem with her aerial.

 

And so again, I am patient as she tells me, she was right, you know. The problem had nothing to do with her TV. How clever was she to stop herself from going out and buying a TV. I agree with her. Very clever indeed.

 

We carry on talking and she asks me how Richard is. My husband is called Rob. I add this to the mental list of mistakes she makes these days, wondering, worrying. Is this the start of a new phase of mothering my mum? In moments like this I remind myself not to correct her, not to tell her she’s wrong. I remind her when she asks of the name of that magician married to Debbie Whats-it - Paul Daniels. Why she wants to remember that, I’ll not ask. I ignore when she calls me Devvy and wonder if it’s memory or comfort that means she calls me by my dad’s name. I pretend not to notice when she can’t recall what you call those words at the bottom of the TV screen, and just throw in a remark that don't use subtitles because I struggle to read them alongside watching the programme. 

 

I ignore a lot I find both of our lives are easier if I ignore most things.