Thirtysomething

My Intended

I always think Christmas ends too abruptly. Really. Even though people (including me) complain when stores start pushing the holidays before Thanksgiving, I still feel like it ends too soon. Like on the radio, for instance. I always think it's so abrupt the way the radio stations play no Christmas songs after December 25th. I can understand not playing them 24/7 the way they do up to Christmas, but when I was driving today, I would have liked an occasional Christmas song on the radio today.

Anyway, Christmas was fine. My poor Nana is going senile and she was having a particularly bad couple of day. At certain points she didn't really know where was was. She would say random things that didn't make any sense. Sometimes it provided for comic relief. Not that it's nice to laugh at your senile grandmother, but honestly, you can't not laugh at some of this stuff. Like I had gotten my grandmother a head scarf, because she's always cold and usually wraps a regular scarf around her head when outside (strangely, she refuses to wear a hat). So I put it on her, to show her how to wear it, and she left it on while she opened another present. Five minutes later, having totally forgotten anything else that preceeded, she pulled at the scarf, looked at my mother and said "Someone put a sweater on my head." Well, we all roared laughing. Not right, I know.

While she does remember that I'm getting married, she always thinks the wedding is in the next day or so and also she can't remember Ron's name. So she called him my intended. As in "Is your intended coming for dinner?" She was obsessed with my intended the last couple of days. As is very symptomatic of her condition, once she gets an idea in her head, she is fixated on it--I think because she worries that she'll forget whatever she thought of. So she got it into her head that Ron was coming for Christmas dinner. Which he wasn't. No one ever told her he was. Yet she would ask about ever 10 minutes if he was coming. I repeatedly and patiently explained that he was spending Christmas with his family. Then every so often she would ask whether the doorbell had just rung. She was convinced it had, but when we explained that, no, it had not, she wondered whether it was my intended at the door. So set was she on the idea that Ron was coming, that when I explained for the bzillionth time that he wasn't coming she said, "He has some nerve doing that to you." Because, in her mind, my intended was standing me up, I suppose.

Unfortunately, as funny as some moments are, the underlying fact that she's losing her mind is sad. My mother is at her wit's end. My grandmother is scheduled to move closer to my parents next month. She'll be moving into a regular apartment, which I don't think is a good idea. I think she'll go downhill rapidly from there--at least mentally. But, there are waiting lists for all the assisted living places my mother is considering. And she doesn't want to even talk about putting her in a nursing home. There's a bit of denial going on there too.

So it wasn't a bad Christmas. I made out quite well, present-wise. Being registered is a wonderful thing. I got two more place settings. I'm so in love with my china, but I am worried I'm not going to get all my pieces. So now, I have 4 place settings, which means I can have at least two guests come for a proper dinner.

I hope all of you had a good Christmas too.

posted by DJ Heavy D @ 12:37 PM