Yes, so I'm going back a couple years when I was taking care of my mother. The girls here at work are talking about sleep dep and I'm amazingly well rested, but that wasn't always the case. When I worked nights proofreading at Bowne and took care of my mother, there were many times I didn't sleep days at a row, or I had to flip my sleep schedule until I couldn't remember what hour, or even day, it was. I remember going to sleep at three in the afternoon one day, setting my alarm for seven that night after not sleeping a couple days. I woke up at six-thirty, really refreshed, wow. I felt great, well rested, and I walked out to the living room and told my mom I'd had the best sleep ever. She nodded, "Well, you should have had the best sleep ever, you've been sleeping since yesterday afternoon." Er? She'd called my boss and told her that I was crashed and my boss put me on sick time, no harm no foul, but I think it was the only time in 2 years I had over five hours of sleep. That was until JT came to visit.
Alright, so I'm getting back to the story that is making me smile now. My youngest brother JT comes in from Ohio to see my mother just after she had to begin chemo the second time. The first year she did chemo was a dream. She had no major side effects, not a lot of nausea, and most of the time she would come home from chemo, toddle off to bed, and sleep for three days. She spent a year without having to do chemo (Frankly, a little scarier than the first chemo year because she insisted on driving while she was taking morphine and vicodin. She was perfectly lucid, sure, but once she called me from the corner of 'walk' and 'don't walk' and asked me how to get home. She was parked at the corner where her church was, the church she'd been a member of for over a decade...yeah. I jumped every time my cell rang.) and when she went back to chemo she had all the worst side effects. I was beaten down exhausted when there was a knock on the door and I open it to see my brother. My people aren't big on saying we're coming to visit, and we're even worse at saying goodbye, so I roll with it. I hug him, ask him why the surprise visit, and how is he doing? (If this were my eldest brother Max he'd have his white glove ready for a surpise inspection, but JT is cool. JT thinks the place is way cleaner than his apartment and tells me it smells April fresh, whether it does or not.)
JT was at his desk one day and thought about how much he would miss his mom when she was gone, called HR to schedule a week off, and was at the airport a couple hours later. Right on. So just then my mother wakes up from her nap, hearing me talking to someone, and she toddles out to see who has come to visit. I say 'toddle' because my mother can stand and immediately move forward, like a toddler, but if she has to stand and stay in one place, her legs shake and she falls down. She sees JT and she lights up like Christmas is early this year. JT stands, he smiles down at her, she smiles up at him and I realize, they have the same smile. He hugs her and she breaks down into tears, sobbing, and I'm almost there too, until he says, "Don't start crying old lady, I'm here to make you work." Sorry? My mom looks up, puzzled, and he follows that up with, "I'm here to learn the secret carrot cake recipe. I stopped at the grocery store on the way here. Teach me, Obi-mom."
There isn't anything more my mother loved than teaching her kids how to carry on traditions and she's again smiling happily, he's going to the car to get groceries, and she asks me if I knew he was coming. I told her I had no idea, as I'm picking up loose papers, notebooks, shoes, etc, but what a lovely surprise. JT returns with enough groceries to feed, well, everyone and I ask him how many carrot cakes he's planning to make and he said there might have to be many trials to get it right. Then he tells me I look like crap (Er, thanks!) and I should go to bed. I had the day off, sure, but I had errands to run and stuff to do, so he had me make a list and ordered me to bed. He'd get it done. Even if he didn't get it done, ten minutes of JT in the house had perked my mother up from her horrible experience, and that was worth twenty promises of getting it done.
I go to crash, this time a planned crash, and I sleep. I sleep like a baby. I sleep like nothing is wrong, which is really the best sleep, ever. I wake up the next day and Mom is in her chair, JT is on the floor, and they have her piano bench between them and they're playing gin rummy. The place is clean, I mean, really really really (Did I mention 'really'???) clean, and it smells like Chinese food and carrot cake, and on the dining room table are both. He tells me to help myself, so I go to the fridge for a soda and it's packed with groceries, so I pick out a diet Coke, grab a plate and go with it. I ask him about the groceries and he said it was important for a good house guest to pitch in. Nice! Mom's kicking the crap out of him at gin rummy, I have kung pao and mom's carrot cake, all is right with the world.
Well, all week he's doing my errands, refilling mom's meds, taking her to her next chemo treatment (chemo lasts 6 hours and he stays for the whole thing, what a champ) and he takes her to see a movie (I think it was Seabiscuit because there were many jokes about dog food and glue.) and he goes shopping for her. She's lost her hair and the hat she used for the last time she did chemo is alright but she's tired of it, so he buys another hat for her, he plants a garden on our patio, and once I woke up before work to find them pigging out on pies. I mean, seriously, my mother is sitting in her chair with a cherry pie and a fork. I always joked that my mother could have whatever she wanted, if she wanted a pie and a fork I'd give it to her, and he took me seriously. The last day he was there he took her out to the Cheesecake Factory and bought her new night gowns and slippers, and they spent a couple hours having a quiet conversation I could tell was private so I didn't bother them. My mother never told me what it was about and I didn't ask. I think people should have secrets and parents should have special moments with each child individually, even if the mother is 66 and her son is 34.
I walked JT to his rental car and thanked him for the most restful week of the year. He said he'd talked to our sister Mary on his cell from the airport, told her he'd decided to visit Mom, and she'd told him I'd taken the whole thing on myself, that everything from buying all the groceries, medications, chemo co-pays--just everything came out of my pocket and she didn't know how I did it, so he wanted to give me a rest and stock us up on everything. Wow. Now, I'm not a martyr by any means and mom had an income of her own, but it wasn't much and I filled in many, many gaps but she was my mom. She paid for everything when I was growing up, it was time to return the favor, eh? I gave JT a big hug and thanked him, but then he rubbed it in that he knew mom's secret carrot cake recipe and I didn't. I asked him to fess up and he refused, and so we're both in our thirties, standing in the parking lot, arguing like we're still in our single digits. I'm telling him he owes me from the time he gave my first Barbie doll a swirlie, and he's countering with the time I pushed him off Uncle Bob's second floor terrace into Aunt Arlene's rose bushes---sheesh. A boy has his mother and aunt pull out a hundred thorns with tweezers and I spend the rest of my life living it down.
A week after he left I run out of diet Coke, move the empty refrigerator box, and find a few Costco gift cards, which I later find out total more than $2,000. I call him at the office in Ohio and yell, "Punk!" and he counters with, "Muahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa." and hangs up.
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