DUTY CALLS

I have been trying to write this all day and it hasn't worked. I keep sounding like I'm whining and bitching about two old dears who think I'm an angel and wouldn't be alive without me. I'm not an angel, I am whining and they probably wouldn't be alive without me but it's my blog and I'll whine if I want to.

My mum and mum-in-law, two frail bodies but with wills of iron. I still call her mother-in-law because she insists she is, the blonde is just the other one he married. Since 2000, one or the other has been ill or in hospital and only in the last 6 months have I had time to do what I wanted. The dream of going back to university has long faded although it's still hilarious to my mother that I read New Scientist instead of New Idea. Both of them thought I would die of malnutrition when I stopped eating meat. They would say I should get out more and meet people then worry in case I did.

After passing so many milestones this year, I find I am being sucked back into the parental black hole of dutiful daughter and I don't see how I can fight it. The only fight I have won is to keep my mobile phone a secret except from MIL who loves the fact that she knows something my mother doesn't. If my mother thought she could get me 24 hours a day she would be in seventh heaven and I would be in hell.

Yesterday I had to take her for an eye test. Being in a large shopping centre showed how frail and unsteady she is outside her safety zone. I'd organized a wheelchair and the brick outhouse to wheel her but she had to admit she wasn't comfortable with people rushing around her. It was me doing the rushing, up and down 3 levels of shopping centre following the list of instructions because "we might as well do everything while we're here". "We"? I have blisters on my blisters. She has a cataract on one eye and some wrinkling behind the lens of the other.
We have a visit to a specialist on Friday to find out just how bad things are.

The Blight hasn't told his mother he's going away for 2 weeks after Christmas and won't see her. I won't tell you who the despicable person was who leaked that information. I had to promise I would be there for her and it didn't matter if the weather was stinking hot. I would get to her no matter what and she was happy then. What else could I do, she's nearly 93. What kind of person would leave an old lady, the other one he married, of course. In case you think I'm being hard on the Blonde, I was inclined to step back and let her take my place as DIL. That was until I heard her tell a nurse that MIL was not trying too hard to get better as she loved the attention. The attention she was getting was for a shattered hip joint, joined with 3 huge screws through a metal plate on the thigh bone and she was 89 at the time. I knew what kind of compassion she could expect after that.

So it looks like the next three months of my life is mapped out for me. Perhaps it won't be too bad, I may not have time for the usual Christmas depression to take hold. Maybe I won't even think about when I get to their age that there will be no-one around for me to lean on. Now that bugs me, the fact that the buck stops with me.