Once monthly, I take a long bus ride to my mom’s house, for a visit. It’s not quite a chore and I don’t dread it, but I don’t look forward to it.
She’s my mom, and she’s like a lot of moms, only more so. I’m an extremely private person, and she’s very inquisitive about my life, dare I say intrusive. Though I must add, she’s mellowed as she’s aged into her 90s, and she no longer makes me mental, like she did for most of my life.
Tuesday was our monthly visit, and we’d agreed that I’d be there at about 10:30 AM. I’d volunteered to bring lunch, so I stopped at Taco Time, got us each a chicken burrito, and arrived at Mom’s at pretnear exactly 10:30. She was sitting on the porch with someone else, which immediately filled my mind with unpleasant flashbacks.
Several times over our long lives, Mom & I have arranged to meet somewhere, just her and me, but when I arrived she was with her pastor, who’d then try to convert me and get me to church on Sunday. These ambushes made me furious every time, but the last ambush was many years ago.
And as I approached the porch, the mystery guest came into focus in my less than 20/20 vision, and I recognized her — it was Paulette, who’s not a danger of trying to convert me.
Paulette is an odd woman about my age, who’s attached herself to my mother. She comes over almost daily, without warning or invitation, to bring Mom healthy food she’s made, and tell Mom to drink plenty of fluids, and nose herself into Mom’s affairs. Paulette is weird, in a word, but Mom tolerates her, so I tolerate her.
Paulette stayed for the first 45 minutes of my visit, and asked several questions of me, all of which I sidestepped. She’d brought leftover tuna casserole, and wanted Mom to eat it immediately. Mom said, “No, Doug brought burritos,” but I’d only brought two, so Mom said we shouldn’t eat until Paulette had left. The high point of my visit with Mom was the fourth time Paulette said she had to go, which was the time when she actually went away. The burritos had gotten cold, so we microwaved our lunch, and it was OK.
After that it was just Mom and me, sitting on the open-air porch because it was a crazy hot day — 91° in mid-September. Mom thought there’d be a breeze outside, so we’d be more comfortable than inside the un-air conditioned house.
“I’m losing my faculties,” she said at one point, which she is and we all know it, but this was the first I’d heard Mom confess it. She was half-joking: “The faculty I’ve lost is one of my hearing aids, mailed in for de-waxing. When it gets back, I’ll mail in the other one.”
But we also talked about her more permanent loss of faculties. “I forget things,” she said, “more than even a few months ago. Sometimes, with both hearing aids in, hearing all the words someone says, getting the meaning is a delayed reaction.”
“Same here,” I confessed. “I don’t have hearing aids, but what people say sometimes makes no sense to me. It’s part of being old. Is it getting worse for you?”
“Eh? What do you mean?” she said, and then smiled. Mom was messing with me. “Yeah,” she said, “it’s getting worse, but my doctor says not to worry, long as I still know who I am, and where I am, and get to my appointments on time.”
Eventually the porch was too hot, and inside seemed a bit cooler, so we settled into the living room for a few hours, drank diet soda and talked about the new usual things we talk about — Mom’s recent scores playing Wordle, and stories I already knew about everyone in the family, and a light smattering of politics. Mom’s always been a Republican, but she hates Donald Trump.
All this is a grand improvement over the old usual things. Used to be, every time I visited, Mom would complain that I never visit. She’d remind me that I’d disappeared for years and years and she hadn’t known whether I was alive or dead (guilty as charged, again). She’d ask about ex-girlfriends I haven’t seen in decades, tell me to get my crooked teeth fixed, and remind me about things I’d rather forget. And she’d do all this while the TV was blaring the Circus Freakshow Channel, with shows like Dr Pimple Popper, and several different series about fat people trying to lose weight.
Nowadays, those uncomfortable questions seem to have receded deeper into Mom’s mind, unavailable for needling me every time she sees me. And her TV is broken, so there was no Circus Freakshow Channel for this visit.
She’s still my mom, though, so when I started saying thanks and goodbye, Mom said it was too soon to leave. My visits are always three hours — long enough to be mostly enjoyable, and to say I was there, but not long enough to explode my entire day. This time our conversation flowed extra smooth and I stayed almost 3½ hours, but still she complained that it was too soon. I’m sure she’d say it was too soon if I stayed five hours, or seven.
And as always, she invited me to stay the night. “You sleep in your recliner at home,” she said, which is true, I do, “so you could sleep just as well in my recliner, where you’re sitting right now.”
“I love you, Mom, but no. I have a life and a place of my own, and I’m headed back to it.”
That’s the way every visit with Mom ends: She’s surprised that I’m leaving “already,” and invites me to spend the night. It’s a little awkward, and I believe she wants it that way, for old time’s sake. But we’re closer than we’ve ever been, and Mom with reduced faculties and a broken TV is the best Mom ever.
9/19/2025
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