4 Comments on “Happy Mother’s Day”

1. .
   My mother, a book editor for a Major New York company, had gone back for an M.Ed. and Teaching Certificate, after the divorce. I still have the letters that her 3rd grade students wrote to her while she was dying of Cancer at Sloan-Kettering Memorial, aged 46. Every day past age 46, is icing on the cake for me, and a reminder to live up to her ideals as teacher, teller-of-uncomfortable-truth, political activist (Feminist, Constitutionalist) author, and editor. Thank you, Mom.

2. Nice picture. Sadly we had to cancel lunch with Mom, she fell yesterday and isn’t up to it. But maybe on Wednesday I can take her out to Strickland’s for an orange-pineapple cone. Hope your day is going better.

3. On this side of the Pond we also have Mothering Sunday, as well as Mother’s Day, so I would be pushing my luck going for both.

   Particularly since my daughter’s gift for Mothering Sunday is a trip for us to Paris, followed by some time in Basel, Switzerland, to see a musician friend performing; then we return to Paris, where she has a medical conference, and I return to England. All by high speed train so no airport queues; it really is difficult to imagine anything much better than that.

   Jonathan

   My mother died young too, at 56; she would most definitely approve of living each day the best way you can. I will also concede that she would regard shopping in Paris as a pretty good way of spending a day, so there may be some mitochondrial input there to my daughter and myself, along with the passion for music, and for feeling that helping people is what you do if you are privileged enough to be able to get the training you need to help people.

   Even after all these years I miss her, and I really wish that she could have known my daughter, just as I really wish that my daughter could have known her grandmother. But I know that the best way to honour her is to talk my daughter into buying the pair of shoes that she really, really adores, instead of the stout and practical ones which are useful; that’s what she did to me, in somewhat different circumstances.

   We were staying with friends in Florence, I’d just been promoted, and I wanted a leather coat since Florence is world-renowned for them. I tried a lot on, and settled for a brown number which looked good and wouldn’t show the dirt.

   And then my mother intervened and refused to let me out of the shop until I’d bought the white kidskin trench coat instead, which was about as practical as a chocolate teapot, but looked absolutely stunning on me. One of the many cool things about that was that it carried on looking stunning as many years went on, though my mother lived only to see the first of those years.

   So, as the Romans used to say ‘Carpe Diem!”

4. Aww, Stevie. I’m in the process of losing my mother, and yesterday was sort of ridiculously bad, though it could have been worse.

   She’s had dementia for around five years now. She’s nowhere near 56, though I’m only 31. (I’m one of the youngest in a large family.) Two weeks ago she was admitted to the hospital with dangerous blood clots. After checking her out thoroughly and putting her on blood thinners they wanted to release her to a facility, where she’d get better nursing care than at home. So on… May 3rd, I think, she was moved to a nursing home. I recently moved a thousand miles away, but yesterday I heard she was almost catatonic in the morning. My family asked for a list of her medications and found out they were giving her Seroquel, which says at the very top of its website, in bold,

   “Important Safety Information About SEROQUEL XR: Elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis (having lost touch with reality due to confusion and memory loss) treated with this type of medicine are at an increased risk of death, compared to placebo (sugar pill). SEROQUEL XR is not approved for treating these patients.” Lower down on the page it also says it shouldn’t be given to patients with a history of cardiac problems, which my mom very much has.

   And yet the @#&$ doctor put her on it, without talking to anyone in the family first, because she hit him with a stuffed blue bunny. Clearly she’s “aggressive” and needs to be sedated!

   I skyped with her in the late afternoon. She was doing better, though still confused enough I don’t think she had any idea of what was going on. We were trying to show her my daughter, 18 months, “that cute little girl,” but I guess a video would have been easier for her.

   Later in the evening she had an episode of slurred and incoherent speech, and I went to bed knowing she had been moved back to a hospital and they were running a CT scan, but not the results yet. Today found out she did not have a recent stroke, so that’s good at least. Hopefully now that she’s off Seroquel she’ll recover a little.

   Oh, and on top of that I had a lot of physical pain yesterday related to a recent miscarriage. So yeah. Not my best day ever.

   On the other hand, I have a truly amazing and precious 18-month old, and a husband doing the little things to help make the day better. (And a pain reliever prescription, woo!) And I’m grateful my family found out about the Seroquel fiasco. Could have been much worse.