Obstinance

In the past few weeks, my brothers and sister-in-law and I have learned through the caregiver that Mother is not taking her medications on a daily basis. She has one med she's supposed to take in the morning, and another that she's supposed to take morning and evening. The caregiver sets up the two little segmented pill containers at the beginning of the week. As she leaves after filling them, she sets them on the kitchen counter and turns to Mother to point them out and remind her to take them as instructed. (You might remember that my mother was a nurse and my daddy a doctor, so this is not a foreign concept. And it's a concept of which she understands the consequences.)

In an e-mail to my sister-in-law this weekend, the caregiver wrote, "She smiles her sweet smile." I'm afraid that the caregiver is interpreting that "sweet smile" as acknowledgement rather than acquiesence. I wrote back to my SIL that the caregiver doesn't understand that's the same "sweet smile" Mother smiles when she doesn't hear or understand a word you've said. When I made that statement, my older brother wrote back, "Or she just doesn't care. Or both [didn't understand and doesn't care]."

It's clear that Mother is not just forgetting to take the meds. She is willfully neglecting to take them. One is for the Type 2 diabetes with which she's recently been diagnosed. I don't know the consequences of this action, but I do have to acknowledge that the woman is 96, almost 97, years old, and she can really do what she damned well pleases.

This set of communications with my family reminded me of my teenaged years, when my mother told me, "You'll never get a man. You're too obstinate." I remember the moment so clearly. I was standing at the kitchen sink, doing the dishes. Her words were a knife in my heart. Of course, in the late 1960s in the South, getting a man was the be all and end all. Higher education didn't matter. A rewarding or successful career didn't matter. Getting a man, having babies, raising one's family: those were the objectives of life.

So when a boy proposed to me, I accepted. (I'm sorry—I have a hard time thinking of a 20-year-old boy as a man.) I didn't really like him. But, by God, I was going to show her! She was wrong; I was right. And, thanks to the church's drilling into us that we were never to get divorced, I stayed married to him for ten miserable years. (I reiterate that I wouldn't trade my sons for anything, even if it meant avoiding that ten years of misery. If I had to live through that to have these two handsome and successful young men in my life, I would do it again. I would just be smarter about things I would and wouldn't put up with.)

But back to Mother. Phrases like "it takes one to know one" come to mind.

Who's the obstinate one now?