Homemade pizza

It’s my birthday today. 🎂 🥳

I have never been one to celebrate my birthday particularly, which is a good thing because today wasn’t a celebratory one.

Mum woke up early, hot and anxious, and shouted to me that she didn’t want to see Lady Friday this afternoon. I said something like “fair enough” and went back to sleep.

A while later I was woken again, this time by Suki, and got up to feed her. Mum complained of feeling unwell, and when I went into her room to see her I found out why: her windows were all shut, her fan turned off, and it was stiflingly hot. As usual, mum refused my every suggestion to cool herself down, and it took me quite some time to get her to accept a whirring fan and a glass of iced water.

The rest of the day was spent with mum expressing her anxiety about Lady Friday’s visit by being, frankly, a pain in the backside. I couldn’t sit down for more than two minutes without being summoned to resolve some manufactured crisis: what to wear, where to find what she wanted to wear, where had her glasses gone, no, not those glasses, the other ones.

By lunchtime I was a very thin thread away from throttling her.

Then Lady Friday arrived, and I finally got some respite – for just short of half an hour, anyway. Then they came back from the walk mum spent the morning telling me she didn’t want, and I was straight back into managing mum’s anxiety by way of “where are my sunglasses? I can’t find them, can you come and show me?” Followed shortly afterwards by “where is my sunglasses case? I can’t find it, can you come and show me?”

No amount of “go and ask Lady Friday” worked and, the third or fourth time this happened, I snapped. I marched into the living room, where Lady Friday was watching tv and laughing at the chaos, and reminded her that she was here to give me a break, so could she please help mum and let me have a break. Then I marched back into my room and shut the door behind me.

I used that brief period of actually being left alone to confirm the new respite carer who will be seeing mum for two hours every Tuesday from the start of July, and to book a hotel for my trip over to the mainland in August. I have no intention of mentioning either to mum until much nearer the time, as we have more than enough panic already.

After Lady Friday left, I discovered that she never did find mum’s sunglasses case, and I had to locate it (in the conservatory) for myself. Sigh.

For my birthday dinner I made homemade pizzas. Mum thought this was a lovely idea until she saw me putting the tomato paste on the dough and then it was “urgh, you know I don’t like tomatoes”, and a flat refusal to even try it. Oh well – I enjoyed mine (smoked mozzarella and prosciutto, if you’re wondering), and can have the one I made for mum for lunch tomorrow.

Then we had some of the strawberry swirl cake I bought from a small business online, which might have been better if the delivery driver hadn’t dumped the box in full sun and left without notifying us. Let’s just say the poor cake looked more than a little sorry for itself. It tasted OK, if of nothing more than sweet. That meant mum liked it, anyway.

So that was my birthday. Hopefully it will end with Suki emerging from her self-imposed cupboard exile and treating me to some fur and purr. I could do with some of that after today.