Sticky sausages and spiced chips with salad

Today started somewhat oddly. One minute I was a notorious con artist showing their soft side by rescuing a kitten, only I was an inflatable and so was the kitten (it didn’t make sense at the time, let alone on recounting), and the next mum was telling me her stomach really hurt, and she didn’t want to go out to lunch on Sunday, and could she have a hug?

Once I had adjusted back to reality and no longer having to hold onto things so I didn’t float away, I hugged mum to calm her down, gave her her tablet for stomach pain, and went back to sleep for about 5 minutes, before mum woke me up again.

And again, and again, and so on.

When I eventually gave up and got up (and how often I use that phrase!), mum spent the next few hours alternating between complaining her stomach hurt, complaining that her back hurt, demanding that I tell her friend she didn’t want to go to lunch, apologising for everything she had just said, and performatively going to bed. Then she’d get up, say “my stomach hurts and I don’t know why”, and off we’d go again.

After lunch, I decided to go out into the garden and plant the poor dahlia bulbs (corms? rhizomes? whatever – the bits you bury to produce flowers) that have been in a bag in my bedroom since early summer. Mum said she was going to bed, then changed her mind and came outside with me.

After a while she went back to bed, then came back outside, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she apologised for her earlier behaviour and went back to her normal self. This evening she fixed a broken blind with some cotton thread and the sort of ingenuity I thought had long since been lost¹, and now we’re sitting discussing our forthcoming Sunday lunch on a cattle farm, with minor to no panic.

I like this version of mum: can I keep her, please?

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Dinner was another Simply Cook recipe kit, for hotdogs and chips: I replaced the hotdogs buns with salad, because health. 😇 (And we didn’t have any hotdog buns anyway.)

As a meal it was fine: mum said it was a bit spicy, although I can’t say that I noticed. Then I ate an apple (😇 again), then somehow managed to eat an entire tub of cookie dough ice cream, which I’m expecting to start regretting any minute now as my body reminds me it doesn’t care for lactose.

So there we go: another hard-hitting report from the ragged edges of being a carer. One of these days I intend to write something about adapting to being disabled, and/or about adapting to being a carer, but apparently that won’t be happening today. Sorry.

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1. I will add “buy new blinds” to my 50+ item to do list. ↩︎