Mom Never Gives Up - Part One

“Mom, you need to use your walker,” I say to my 88-year-old mother.  She thinks it makes her look old.

“Hardly sexy, me using a walker.”

“Please: You’ve got Parkinson’s! You could fall.”

None of my warnings stop her from sneaking around without it. I remind her daily, beg her.  We even got a red-metallic rolling walker.

“I use it. I use it,” she protested, last weekend when I caught her getting up from her chair without it. “See!” she said, resting a single manicured finger on one handle.

Last Monday night, her assisted living facility called me. Instead of the usual message informing me that my mother had tried to leave the facility with one man or another, the message was more to the point.

“Your mother has taken a fall – she seems fine, but there’s a tiny little cut on the back of her head. We’re sending her over to St. John’s in an ambulance.”

“I’ll be right there.”  It was her second fall in two weeks.

The first time she fell, I’d gotten a call on a Friday at work. “We’ve assessed her,” her caregiver told me. “We just want to have her checked out in the ER to make sure.” 

After being seen on the first fall, the ER nurse asked me to step out of the room.  I turned to my mother sitting in a hospital wheelchair reapplying lipstick.

Out in the hall, the nurse lowered her voice:  “Does your mother always answer questions this inappropriately? With her fall and all. Could she have hit her head, causing her to act out of the ordinary?”

“Oh, you mean when she told the doctor he was a stud and his arm muscles turned her on?”

The nurse nodded.

“And when she said how she loved being here with all these men lifting her on to the table when she got the X-Ray on her arm.”

“Well, yes,” she replied.  “It’s just that…” the nurse stammered, searching. ”It’s just unusual, a woman her age - you know, being so….”

“Fixated on men?”

“Yes,” she laughed.

“Trust me. This is normal.” I said. “It’s been all about a man all her life. She hasn’t changed.”

“This isn’t new?”

“Hardly,” I laughed. “My mom kissed little Kenneth Carrier in Kindergarten and it hasn’t stopped.”

“At five?” she asked, trying to remain clinical.

Married three times - twice divorced, once widowed and now in assisted living, my mother is still boy crazy.

When she stops flirting and looking at men as some sort of prize win, I’ll know she is winding down.