My mother in law is 83. She will be 84 in April if I don’t kill her in March. She is a sweet, wonderful, generous, totally exasperating, and infuriatingly frustrating woman. And that is on her good days. She is from Illinois. Not quite middle America, not quite East coast. Not quite Bible belt, not quite border region. Not quite normal, not quite certifiable. (yet) Just good old hillbilly hick. (without the twang) She married my father-in-law when she was 16 years old and came to New York a child bride. She raised three sons, each to their own degree of normalcy, one of which obviously, I am married to. Over the years I have come to understand her idiosyncrasies and more often than not ignore her….I mean, them.
My father in law passed away almost two years ago and although she fought with him on a daily basis, she misses him and says she still hears him peeing in the morning. (More info than I needed….) Recently my brother in law who lives with her (god bless his patient soul) had to go into the hospital. He has been sick for many years, but like Ben Gazzara on Run For Your Life….he will probably outlive us all. On one occasion when his health was at a low, she called me up in hysterics.
“Oh God, I think he is dead! I can’t wake him. I don’t think he is breathing!” I calmed her enough to tell her to hang up with me and call 911. “That is what Joy said to do.” she makes known. Joy is her sister who lives in….Illinois. My brother in law doesn’t stand a chance if her first call was to Illinois, the second to me….and all before calling 911! He wasn’t dead and he was breathing and 911 could wait for another day.
Since it is basically like the blind leading the blind there, we got her a medic alert…you know the ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” systems. All she has to do is press the button if she has fallen or is ill and a voice will come on the unit and ask what is wrong. If they do not get a response they call…..you got it…ME! So for the first 48 hours she pressed the button twice by mistake. Second 48 hours she was just testing it a few times. By day 5 I had gotten six emergency calls until finally they offered to send someone to explain to her how and how NOT to use the unit. She refused saying she wasn’t an idiot and knew how to use it. I threatened her to not press the button unless it is an emergency or they will come and take the unit away, which of course wasn’t true, but hick, hillbilly….remember?? One Friday I was shopping for about and hour and had accumulated quite a cart-full. My cell phone rang and it was the emergency response unit. I was tempted momentarily not to answer recalling the boy who cried wolf story. But I did and was told she had pressed the button and although they got no response when they asked her if she was ok they did hear her breathing. I thought to myself, good God this is it, she really is in trouble. I sprung into action….ok maybe not sprung per se, but I did abandon my cart full of carefully hand picked items and was en route to her house within minutes. I kept calling her house phone in the hopes that she was ok and contemplated calling 911 in the interim. After several attempts, she answered.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” she answered sounding annoyed that I had interrupted her soap opera.
“The medic alert called me…you pressed the button?”
“Boy are they snitches….I pressed it by mistake.”
“Why didn’t you answer them when they asked you if you were ok?
“I thought they would get mad and take it away.”
So much for threats!
With one son living the life of a recluse in Queens, my husband the workaholic and my brother in law in the hospital the job of making sure she has milk…and bread…and red potatoes falls on me. She loves red potatoes. Can’t be the ones in the bag, can’t be the ones in the bucket, has to be the loose ones that need to be carefully inspected for potato eyes. (don’t ask) I bought the ones in the bucket dumped them in a produce bag and she was happy. Since she eats breakfast at 4:30 am, lunch at 11 and her dinner somewhere around 3, it makes sense that at 6 she is ready for a snack. Her snack of choice is Celeste frozen pizza. Has to be Original Cheese though, not Pepperoni (heartburn), not Vegetable (gassy) and not even X-tra Cheese (bothers her stomach). So of course they are out of Original Cheese. I buy X-tra Cheese and cross out X-tra neatly with a permanent freezer safe Sharpie. She was happy. I bought the wrong oatmeal. She likes the kind you cook. I bought instant. I returned it. I bought 3 minute Oatmeal. Still wrong. I returned it. I bought the right oatmeal. She decides to tell me she already has three in the cupboard. (yes, she calls it a cupboard) Although there is smoke coming out of my ears, she is happy with her oatmeal, her eye-less red potatoes and her frozen X-tra Original Cheese pizza.
Get well soon dear brother in law…PLEASE!
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