Mom Comes to Los Gatos...to Live

Friday morning I boarded SWA headed for John Wayne airport in Newport Beach. My 89 year old mother was there waiting for me. I always feel terribly guilty that she volunteers to retrieve me from the airport as she shouldn't be driving the freeways at her age. Especially as she tends to get lost in even formerly familiar areas. But she was there waiting, ever so reliably so.

We headed home to Whittier and contemplated the task at hand: she was coming to live with J and I in Los Gatos. Permanently. Well, unless it became utterly unbearable for us to all live together. If that ensued then we'd find her suitable senior housing nearby and off she'd go. But we're hoping that it doesn't get to that point.

So here it is Tuesday morning and we haven't all gone crazy, YET, but I acknowledge that it's bound to happen at some point. Frankly, I'm mostly worried that J is going to freak out at some point and lock himself in the garage with his electronic drums for days on end. He has been so patient with all of this so far, that I guess I am afraid that deep down he is wriggling with fright about all of this wondering if he's gone utterly mad for agreeing to let her move in with us. We have our contingency plans in place: they give us some bit of comfort that we have an escape plan should things get too uncomfortable. But in the meanwhile, I see getting a much bigger house a preventive step to that happening - give us all more room to hide from each other, giving us all some semblance of privacy.

As it stands, we have two bathrooms: one in the master (ours) and the hall/guest bathroom (hers). For the time being, our guests will have to tinkle while contemplating her box of hot rollers on the back of the toilet, her dated shower cap in one the bathtub tray, and I can only pray that she's hidden the hot water bottle, with it's assortment of attachments, from our guests' eyes. But if they are so bold as to open the medicine cabinet, they'll catch a glimpse of her caster oil, suppositories, and plethora of seniorly pharmaceuticals. Getting old sucks.

We've given her two of the three bedrooms so that she can watch her soaps while I try to get work (and blogging) done in the living room. Because her hearing is so bad, she tends to watch TV with the subtitles on, so it's not so much the noise that keeps me from being able to work, it's not that, but the fact that she sometimes tends to talk throughout a tv program ("Oh, I missed that...what happened?", "Who is SHE?", "Who is HE?", "Oh I like her because...", etc). She either misses the point of a show or she wants to tell us all about the reasons she likes a particular show or the actors and actresses in them.

Mom lived in her last house since about 1954. So she's got her quirks and ideas about things. She's getting used to the idea of email, but VOIP has her completely baffled. She cannot fathom that our TV, fax, and phone all run through the same line, and or that her old TV antenna is essentially useless with cable tv...why her soaps that were on channel 7 in LA are now on 3. All of this is going to take some getting used to. Hopefully soon she'll feel comfortable enough with Los Gatos, one day soon, that she'll hop into her Camry and zip off to the senior center for lunch each day.

I'm looking forward to that day. :-)