Birthdays and Memories

We're talking about Mum, a recurring topic

in most of our infrequent conversations. I fiddle 

with the receiver to position it so her voice 

delivers a clearer message as she struggles with 

that message, short of breath. We've long since 

exhausted our takes on our mother's suitability 

as a parental role model and through our emotion

starved childhood knew we'd raise our own with 

empathy, open emotion and loving guidance.

Did it help? Do our own children now that we're

so old think more kindly of us than we do of our 

mother? Questions we bat back and forth. Now when 

we speak of our mother it's to recall little events

things we remember about her. She is the younger 

daughter, the one who changed our mother's soiled 

diapers. I'm the older one who rarely visited. Each of 

us thought the other had it easier from our constantly

haranguing mother until one day we finally opened 

it all up and spoke for hours. She can't do that any more. 

Talking exhausts her. Walking exhausts her. She is 

approaching her 81st year. Our mother died at 84 of

frontal-lobe dementia. I feel badly for my little sister 

who sent her older sister a birthday card for her 85th 

birthday, arriving just around the corner of time.