My Life Is Changing

Peace and tranquility ends today. My quiet time at the computer, my walking out the door when I feel like it and my Waffle House mornings are being curtailed. I am on my way, in about an hour, to pick up my mother-in-law, Dot, from the airport. And she is staying until January 1st. Yippee, yippee, Goddman.

She comes down every Christmas. Sweet Tea’s baby sister (she has one living in Oregon, too) still lives in New Jersey and helps take care of Dot, but she is a Jehovah Witness and, therefore does not enjoy the holidays. So Dot gets to visit and enjoy J-Man and Bug over the holidays.

She is an 85 (give or take a year or two) year-old, 5’ 1”, 220 pound bundle of joy from New Jersey. Yes, I have a mixed marriage. I am an Atlanta native and Sweet Tea is from Old Bridge, New Jersey via California. But that’s okay, too. The family seems to like her well enough. In fact, I believe they like her better than me. They tell her all the time that I don’t deserve her and that they feel sorry for her having to be married to me. But that is fodder for another blog. Dot is the fodder for this entry.

She is a hypochondriac and takes 4,657,289 a day and has to have her prescriptions filled at least once a month (I have to believe there has to be some placebos in there.) She has pills for her blood pressure, for her heart, for her diabetes, for her cholesterol, to make her shit and to stop her from shitting, and any ailment she sees on the television. Now, she thanks she has Restless Leg Syndrome (what ever that is.) She also has a tube of ointment for rashes that she keeps in the bathroom that I DON’T want to know anything about.

She uses a walker to help her move around and we have to rearrange the furniture so she can get from on room to another – especially the bathroom. She can’t lie down because she can’t breathe if she does, so she sleeps in a chair in the living room. So we have to hang curtains between the doorways to give her some privacy. She has a very hard time going up the stairs because her legs aren’t strong enough to lift all that weight. So, when it’s time for her to take a shower, she has to have Sweet Tea get behind her and push her up the stairs. It scars me to death because, if Dot slips, Sweet Tea could loose an arm or get her head stuck up that huge ass. I try to look the other way - like trying not to watch a car wreck unfolding. Yuck!

When she sets in HER chair in the den, she has no lap. So Chaplin tries to jump in her lap to get his daily dose of petting, but there isn’t anything for him to land on, so the claws come out and she is hollering, “Shoo, get down, Coffeypot get this thing off me, shoo, ouch, go away. I need to go to the bathroom.” I give Chaplin a high-five and set him in my lap. Good boy!

She isn’t all that bad, I guess. She is a good person, though in an old fashion New Jersey sort of way. She has her opinions and isn’t afraid to use them. But I like that. She is fun to have around (for a day) and I enjoy hearing about her life working at Squibb, making bandages for the solders during WWII, and her job for the company that manufactured explosives. But she loves to whistle. If there is any music on the television, commercial, part of the show, anything, she will whistle along with the music – unless her mouth is full of ice-cream.

As long as I have plenty of ice-cream and fruit around, she is happy. We keep fruit all the time, but the ice-cream… well, I am going to get her a feedbag to hang off her ears and keep it full of ice-cream. That way, she won’t have to get up and waddle to the kitchen, which she has to go through to get to the bathroom, to re-load ten or twenty times a day.

Also, she, Sweet Tea and Dr. Amber are going on a 7-day cruse, too. She wanted one more cruse before she became worm food. It is a trip for the girls, too. I didn’t want to go. Spending a week in a confined space like a ship with her, there might have been a tragedy at sea. She might have ended up as a Dot in the ocean.

Okay! I will have a week to myself. Bit deal! She will still be coming back here.