Ninety-five years young

I've decided to take up my journal again. My mother is still with me and celebrated her ninety-fifth birthday this week. Along with some friends, I took her out to lunch. There is a local pub which does a very good two-course meal, including a carvery, for pensioners. She tucked in to turkey, stuffing, sausage, roast potatoes and parsnips and an assortment of other vegetables. Mum's generation are definitely not prone to being vegetarians - probably because the shortage of meat during the war makes them see it as a luxury item; not that there are too many of her generation still alive.

Before we went out, a carer came to sit with her for a couple of hours. The carer was only ten years younger than her, and thought that she was very spry for her ages. She does have extremely good mobility - no zimmer and she can get up and down stairs. The carer, who is called Sheila did manage to engage Mum in conversation; something I find very difficult to do. Mind you, Sheila is obviously a very good talker. Before she left she had learned that Mum has a son called John, she comes from Cheshire and her father was Irish. Sheila calls herself 'Irish Sheila'. She did, however, say that I deserved a medal.

Having Sheila here for a couple of hours, not only enables me to get out, it does improve the quality of Mum's life. On Wednesday, the psycho-geriatric doctor, who had asked for a brain scan to be performed on Mum, came with the result. She hasn't had a stroke so her form of dementia comes under the umbrella term of 'Altzheimers'. Having ruled out strokes, he is now able to prescribe some medication which will hopefully also improve the quality of her life. The tablet has to be taken at night. She said she'd take it this time, but wouldn't do so again when I presented her with it for the first time. I asked if she'd swallowed it, and she stuck out her tongue like a little girl. These two things do make it a little easier but I'm not getting any help with personal care, frequently become exasperated and am very tied. I discussed residential care with the doctor who said it might be best for both of us as Mum does not really distinguish me from a carer much of the time. I am ready for a break next week when I will visit my son, his wife and my grandson, Rupert, in Switzerland. Mum will go to the Care Home where they know her best.

The Road Not Taken

We've had an awful lot of rain this week, which means that I've been stuck in the house rather too much. However, Sunday was not only drier but much milder too. In afternoon I went for a walk in the forest with three friends and three dogs. I did wish that I'd taken my camera. The photo above was taken last August, in an enclosure called Bolderwood, when there were leaves on the trees and the sun shone. It was really muddy and we sludged and squelched through the grass before coming to a shallow stream. It would normally have been easy to cross but the recent heavy rain wasn't helped by the fact that this part of the forest is frequented by riders on horseback. Two of my friends carried the third, a very game lady in her eighties, who wasn't wearing wellies. I was only wearing wellies (generally I prefer to ruin shoes) because I'd borrowed a pair from the owner of the dogs. I would love to have been able to post a photo of a springer spaniel bathing in a pool of mud. It's the photo rather than the road not taken. Unlike Robert Frost, I didn't stand at the fork in the road and decide which path to take, I simply regretted not doing something but and here I was like him, there was no way that I could go back couldn't go back and take the walk again - the moment was gone forever.

Interrupted

I have never responded well to interrupted sleep, and when my mother knocked on my bedroom door at God knows what time this morning, I told her that it was too early and she should go back to bed. She meekly withdrew, which is not like her - she's usually infuriating in her persistence. My mother is ninety-four years old and has endowed us all with a streak of her cussedness. She came to live with me nine years ago; a situation that in retrospect I didn't think through properly. This is nothing new for me. My elder son has remarked: 'You do get yourself in some pickles'.

Mum has devoted her life to home-making and looking after other people: first my grandmother; then my brother and finally my father up to the time he died eighteen years ago. By 'looking after' I mean care over and above the care she obviously gave everyone, including me when I was growing up; care bordering on nursing. My brother's asthma and eczema, however, miraculously all but disappeared after he finally left home and married. I know that he considers that he has done his duty by telling me that it's not, like the proverbial dog, just for Christmas. Mum, who used to always have a roast dinner waiting for us when we went to stay with her, hasn't cooked since she moved here. She used to dust, iron, wash the dishes and walk to the local newsagent each day for a paper but one by one these activities have fallen off. The last to go was the dishes, which I have to confess was a relief, because I had to do them again on account of her poor eyesight. I now realise that my once capable mother, had enough of a sense of preservation to know that she was becoming incapable of looking after herself although she'd never admit it, least of all to me.

Since the age of eighty-five Mum has suffered from short term memory loss, which has accelerated over the last twelve months: from confusion as to what day it is she now has trouble knowing what part of the day it is or whether it's day or night, which takes me back to where I came in. After my sleep had been so rudely disturbed, I slept fitfully, aware that the landing light was on but too lazy to get out of bed and switch it off. When I finally got up at a reasonable hour, I found that every light in the house was on including the one in my mother's bedroom where she now lay sleeping. I went down for my breakfast, feeling consoled by the fact that, despite rising energy prices the Government gives £300, just before Christmas each year to people of her age, in order to help with fuel bills and ensure that they keep warm. I ate a leisurely breakfast and then read several poems as part of my project to increase my productivity. It was then time to get my mother up.

Of course I felt guilty when I found that she had not only wet the bed, having removed the pad I'd put on her the previous night, but had suffered a fall.

'I went down', she said.

There was blood on her duvet which had come from from her leg, where the paper thin skin had been rolled back to reveal a raw looking gash. It turned out to be less alarming than I had feared, although she was very confused, and I soon had her dressed and downstairs drinking a cup of tea; something she is always ready to do despite my insistence that wants goes in has to come out. Mercifully, I had one dressing left from the last time she knocked her leg. What i haven't mentioned yet, is that my mother is also losing her grip on reality as she slips more and more into dementia. She talks about 'them' and says that 'they' come into her room and take things and one night refused to go to bed because she was waiting for 'the lad to come in'.

This week's prompt for Writers Island is "Fork in the Road" in which we're invited to think about a critical decision we've made or might be about to make. I've shied away writing about my Mum on numerous occasions but the time has come to face up to the dilemma as to what i am to do about her. I live on the edge of the New Forest, a couple of miles from the sea. This is an area where people come to retire and the medical and social services are stretched to breaking point. If I'm lucky I get a couple of week's respite every three months or so. Unlike my mother, I don't have a vocation as a nurse. I also have arthritis in my hands which caused me to drop the shampoo bottle twice last time I washed Mum's hair. I'm a retired maths teacher who likes writing poetry and taking courses with the Open University. I'm currently studying French as my elder son lives in the French speaking part of Switzerland, close to the border, and I have considered moving to France. At the end of this week, i'm starting a course on postcolonial literature as a possible warm up exercise to doing the MA I've been considering for the last twenty or so years. There are many people in this area who live to over ninety and I'm not the only one to be in this position. Nobody is going to help me and the time has come for me to seek a solution to my dilemma. My mother may have looked after her mother who herself looked after my great-grandmother but I know that I can't do it much longer despite the entreaties not to 'put me in one of those places'.

England in Winter

I took this photograph from my back garden as the light was starting to fade this afternoon. We've had some dark, wet, windy miserable days this month. As I went to take the photograph, I was hit by the transition from a centrally heated house to the chill outside, where I could hear water dripping from my neighbours guttering. But even at this bleakest season of the year, the bare trees were set off by the pastels colours of the sky. I have much to be thankful for when some parts of the country have been flooded, and not for the first time this year.