She’s up at 8. Like clockwork.  Up at 8 and in the shower and down the stairs by 9 for her crunchy dry Cheerios and glass of milk on the side and a glass of hot tea in the incessantly beeping microwave begging for someone to come attend.  And Monday is laundry day.  And laundry comes after breakfast, beginning at 10 or so.  I texted my mother about my illness and miserable night, about my aches and chills and inability to sleep, and about needing to rest, and she responded Me Too.  But the water started flowing and squirting, and the washing mashing swooshing and spinning, with my head resting on its pillow and the pipes and drains and machine six inches away through the wall.  Rest now futile, I stood in my bathrobe fuming and wondering and watching my mother jam the dowel into the soaked whites.  You saw my text that I was sick and needed to rest, right?  You know that my bed is just on the other side of the pipes and I can hear everything, like my head is inside the washer, right?  Well, I waited for a while…but I was out of clean underwear.  I’m just trying to understand what you were thinking.  Because you could have done the laundry later, like at 1, or at 2, right, so I could rest?  Well, I don’t know, I was out of clean underwear.  This conversation came slowly, in snippets, as I gauged her capacity to absorb feedback without hurting her feelings, and like most such conversation with her, she had no capacity and did have hurt feelings, so I had failed again at discerning how to communicate through dementia.  She seemed confused at the notion of delay and incapable of weighing priorities and convinced that her need for tomorrow’s clean underwear was paramount today, and she must do the laundry, now now now, before it was too late and the day had turned into late Monday or, forbit it, tomorrow.

(Image by moerschy from Pixabay)