It Ain't Easy Bein' Mom

            You never know the rigors of what someone else does until you have to do it in their place.  This goes quadruple for anyone who has to temporarily fill in for their mother or wife. 

            I gained a better understanding of this concept when my mom was hospitalized for two weeks last Christmas.  As our mother’s mobility and vision have steadily declined over the years, my sister Charlotte and I have gradually taken over the more physical and difficult December tasks.  I quickly realized, however, that we were only lowly stagehands in the great Holiday Spectacular, waiting for instructions from Director Mom.  With the Great Multi-Tasker suddenly in Cardiac Intensive Care after a heart attack, Charlotte and I were left staring at each other, mouths agape.  Gifts weren’t bought.  Unbought gifts generally means they aren’t wrapped, either (crap!).  Some food had been purchased, but I had never, ever made a holiday dinner on my own without the benefit of my mother’s bossing – err, supervision, and Charlotte’s greatest culinary achievement is fish sticks.

           

Add on to all of this the stress of running both of our family businesses, closing out the fiscal year, and making sure my own small children had a memorable holiday without Grandma.  I’m still not sure how my sister and I made it to January with our sanities intact.  We cried (rare for us), screamed (not rare for us), made lists, took shifts at the hospital and the office, kept an eye on our aging father, and had marathon gift-wrapping sessions.  Charlotte shopped for gifts for dozens of people until the wee hours of morning, while I ran financial reports and culled the traditionally huge holiday menu down to what I could manage without calling in Rachael Ray.

            We took pictures over the course of her hospitalization of the refrigerator full of food, the counters full of home baked treats, and the growing pile of gifts (wrapped with bows and EVERYTHING!) under the tree.  One of us (I don’t remember who now) even managed to bake up enough homemade cookies to make a whole floor full of nurses happy.  Mom obsessed over what she thought was a ruined Christmas and seemed amazed that we had given up sleeping to assure holiday merriment instead of turning off our cell phones and dashing off to Cozumel.  We insisted on postponing Christmas for the adults until she came home, and she insisted that we have Christmas dinner on the 25^th as we normally do.  As I fed her contraband ham, mashed potatoes, and date pudding I’d smuggled into the cardiac unit, she finally seemed to accept that Charlotte and I had not allowed the holiday to turn into How the Heart Attacked Christmas.

No matter how much I may think my sister and I do for our mom, she’s still the director, and we’re just stagehands.  I’ve now discovered that I am perfectly capable of making a tasty and enjoyable holiday meal, but I still want the presence of a bossy, crotchety old grump at the kitchen table, scrutinizing each of the nine varieties of gravy and squawking over the differences in the way we cook green beans.  I’m sure Charlotte won’t mind chasing behind said grump in the motorized scooter this December, dragging her purchases through the mall until security kicks them out at closing time.  It’s got to be way better than the “Where are you?  What did you buy?” calls every 3.5 nanoseconds.  The heart problems in no way affected her speed in dialing a phone, let me tell you.

It ain’t easy bein’ Mom.  I’ve also come to the conclusion that it might even be just a little harder bein’ Mom and trusting others enough to be you for awhile.