Mom is sick

It’s been a hellish 3 weeks. I didn’t mean to let so much time go by. I keep thinking all I’m doing is bitching and moaning, when what I intended to do was document my current situation and the move and the transition. This whole time living here is such a “time out of time” kind of time, in a way.

But then my mother got a really bad respiratory thing, that kept her in bed for 5 days, and that was unusual in itself, but then she was hospitalized! I don’t think she’s ever been hospitalized for an illness (for some other things, but not being sick). She was there from Monday until Thursday last week, and when she came home it was right back to bed.

My dad is having a hard time feeding himself. That’s not as tragic as it sounds; he’s having a hard time because he’s never had to do it. My mother scurries around him cleaning and cooking and shopping and doing, and Dad spends a lot of time watching bad TV. Now that she’s bedridden, and I am not available, he’s had to fend for himself, poor baby. First it consisted of eating all the leftovers in the refrigerator, then a lot of sandwiches, and finally he went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of Marie Callendar frozen dinners. I’ve watched him carefully reading the back of the box for directions on how to microwave them.

If he hadn’t always been such a bully, such a short-tempered, impatient, self-absorbed know-it-all, I’d feel kind of sorry for him. He has stated petulantly more than once “I can’t go anywhere,” and self-righteously “I’ve got one person to take care of, I can’t deal with anything else!” (This last one after I found my daughter in the cold, dark pool room watching Harry Potter without so much as a throw around her, let alone the space heater on that my nephew used down there.) He has complained about having to do a load of laundry and of being “up all night” because of my mother.

He says these things to me – the one person in the house who has a full time job, and hour-plus each way commute, a full course load of homework, and a four year old. And there is no sense of irony, whatsoever.