Mom talks to herself. It started about six years ago when her husband of 50+ years passed away and she found herself living by herself for the first time in her entire life. Born into a family of parents and several sisters, then going from that home to one with her husband, to now living alone, is totally new for her. She feels as though she pretty much has to rely on herself to get things done, despite how often her children are around.
Sitting in the kitchen, her favorite place to be, smoking, watching her favorite cooking shows, I’ll hear my mother say, “I need to…” and then a litany of all the things she needs to get done. Mom doesn’t make requests, she’d rather go without, though it drives her crazy, but she won’t ask, a bane of her generation of women. And so my sister and I have come to interpret “I have to…” to really mean “Will you do x, y, or z for me?” At times I am overwhelmed by the number of “I have to’s…” that come out of her mouth at one time, as I leap up to fulfill her latest hidden requests. This morning I discovered a main source of our mother/daughter upsets during my stay with her. Momma should have had six kids, if not more. She’d have enough tasks, errands, chores, missions, and jobs to keep us all busy! She recently confessed, “I don’t want to do anything (at my age) if I don’t have to.” Aha!! She should have been a CEO!
Stressed by feeling I’ve got to take care of all of Mom’s needs, and get right to it, and exhausted when I try, I've just noticed that the barrage of "I have to's..." is her internal conversation on loudspeaker. Most of the time she doesn’t even know she’s speaking aloud. Like all of us, throughout the day, we have enumerable things that need to get done and remind ourselves by thinking about them over and over again. Some of us make lists, others simply recite to ourselves on occasion, our list of to do’s, “I have to x, y, z” and then later on, “I’d better get to x, y z” and even later if we haven’t fulfilled on all of our “have to’s”, that inner conversation is there to remind us, “I’d better get to it, it’s getting late.” If only I could find the button to turn Mom’s loud speaker off!
grateful to have a mother
