Pizza and salad

As you doubtless know, I love my mother very much. Please bear this in mind when reading the following whinge!

At 5.36am I woke up needing the loo but reluctant to go as I would probably wake mum up, and a freshly awakened mum is confused and often frightened. I couldn’t wait, though, so I went and, predictably, mum woke up (how is it that she can’t hear what I’m saying when I’m sitting right next to her, but tiptoeing to the bathroom always wakes her?) and I met her at the door to my room, asking almost tearfully if she had to go out now.

I reassured her that she didn’t have to go out until tomorrow lunchtime and that she could go back to sleep, which she did for a couple of hours until she knocked on my door to tell me she wasn’t feeling well. I gave her some medicine and suggested she try to sleep some more. She managed 45 minutes before knocking again to let me know the medicine hadn’t worked yet. This was repeated twice more before I gave in and got up, to a comment on how late I was in getting up, to which I had no polite response.

Mum made me a cup of coffee (thank you!) then went back to bed, fully dressed, as she could see no point in getting up. Her mood has been getting lower and lower for some weeks, and I will be calling the GP tomorrow to arrange for her (or me, on her behalf) to talk to someone about her low mood and the anxiety that, to my shame, I find deeply frustrating. There is a limit to how many times a person can explain that you’re meeting your friend for lunch tomorrow, and yes, that’s after you’ve slept, and yes, that outfit looks fine (and so do the other three you’ve shown me four times this afternoon), and it’s 12pm tomorrow, and you’re going out for lunch, and so on in seemingly endless circles until I’m fighting the urge to scream.

At some point during all this I managed to call the boiler company to let them know that our ‘repaired’ boiler is leaking again, and someone duly turned up to fix it. The fix didn’t work, sadly, so I’m going to have to call them again. Sigh.

After all that I really couldn’t be bothered to do a proper dinner, so we had frozen pizza – a cheese and ham one from Iceland that tasted good but had a base so hard I struggled to cut through it even with our best knife. With it was a salad of little gem lettuce and cherry tomatoes, and the heart of the lettuce I ate while preparing the salad was one of the best things I’ve eaten in ages (so crunchy! So juicy! So sweet!).

And so to the end of another day. Hopefully mum will feel well enough to go out to lunch tomorrow – she has said several times that she doesn’t think she’ll go, but I think it will do her good if she can – and I’ll get some time to make some phone calls. As always, I’ll let you know.