She raised me right.
I recently got back home from taking care of my mother. She went in for a simple hip replacement and there were “complications”.
Posted from Social Media: “What started out as a simple hip replacement has gone awry. There were “complications”. The doctor broke her bone during surgery. A piece of her greater trochanter chipped off when they had her in traction because her bones were "softer than they anticipated". The abductor muscle that is attached to that little piece of bone that came off had to be reattached to what is left of the bone. Since it is only held on by a couple sutures she has to wait until it heals (about 6 weeks) before she can start working on her actual hip replacement therapy. She can't walk or put any weight on it for that long, and so it'll be three months before she's able to get on a horse and even then the doctor is iffy. She took it very badly at first but she's mostly concerned about the horses needing to be ridden for her granddaughter this summer and about how she's going to finish out teaching her gymnastics classes. We're here at the hospital until her blood pressure stops dropping and she’s able to successfully get in and out of bed. She isn’t able to bend at a 90 degree angle and she can’t let her leg go out or in (abduction moves) or she’ll tear the sutures, which is kind of a moot point since she still doesn’t have feeling in part of her hip anyway. She oscillates between being super bummed out and stressed about all the things she needs to do and can’t and then optimism because she can’t help but always see the positive in terrible situations. I, of course, after hearing “patience is a virtue” from her my whole life have done my duty to make sure to rub that in her face as a good daughter should because someone has to say it. My dad has been handling everything like a champ and been glued to her side trying to learn everything he can about how to move her and take care of her. Padme has been patiently waiting at the hotel for her to be released so she can start the real caretaking.”
I’m not sure if any of you have had the occasion to have to go home to take care of your parents. There are a lot of mixed emotions there. It is hard to see your parents get older, but it is also hard to witness your parents being faced with getting older.
When the social worker at the hospital sat down with my mom she asked her, “To you, what does a life worth living look like?” Without hesitation my mother replies, “Riding horses.” Now I know most of you are thinking… “um… you were right there?! Shouldn’t she have said her children? Her husband? Her grandchildren?!” You don’t know my mother. The fact that she didn’t say those things is irrelevant. She has lived a life that has shown us all that we are her world. It is deeply engrained in us that her love for us is of the upmost.
Later, when I was home and I was asked how I feel about her immediate response being her horses instead of me, I said that I felt very okay with it.
Here is how I explained this: My mother and father have had their children grow up and become good people and move away. They had to learn how to have lives of their own. They have grandchildren who do not live close and rarely come to visit. They have had to create a world around them that supports their needs without us. They’ve had needs and desires that had to be fulfilled without us. They realized years ago that we, my brothers and I, cannot be there all the time at the drop of a hat. They’ve raised us too well. From young ages all three of us have been incredibly independent and our reach has gone far from home early. This is what good parents do. So I am happy that my mother has been able to create a world that makes her happy and fulfills her needs for love and comfort. She has two “daughters” that live close (past gymnasts that now help her teach in the gym) who have their own children that both my father and mother can be grandparents too. My brothers both have three children each but neither of them are close and some of those kids are branching out and moving away and creating their own families now. Although I don’t have children, we can certainly say that Padme certainly tries to fulfill the grandchild role by forcing her love on them when she can. I can’t be her everything. She knows this. It doesn’t mean I’m a terrible daughter. It just means she raised me right. She also knows that when she needed me most, I would take time off work to come be by her side to help her through. She raised me right.
Also, Padme totally took advantage of the hotel living lifestyle…
