Mother Moves In

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I am hanging Mother’s paintings and pictures in my study. The study smells of drying paint and I have a headache. I am not sure if the ache is because of the paint’s volatile organic compounds or because I cannot hang a single painting straight.

I am frustrated because I’m not even winging it like I normally do with household chores. I have done some preparation. I have watched a Wickes DIY video on how to hang pictures (twice) and bought a new tape measure, plugs, picture wire and a hammer. I’ve put a pencil behind my ear like a DIY guru, in the hope that by living the part like a Method actor, I’ll be able to get the pictures up fast and efficiently. But after four hours only three mall pictures are on the wall. 

‘You’re not a natural at this DIY thing, are you?’ says my Wife from the doorway. ‘It all looks a little random.’ 

She’s right. There’s no rhyme or reason to the way the pictures are hanging.

‘I didn’t want it to look formal like an exhibition,’ I say lamely. 

I am hanging Mother’s pictures in my study because she moves in next week and my man cave is becoming her bedroom. She has called time on solo living.  It is the end of hesitation and the start of something new, though none of us is quite sure what.

Many of the photographs are from a shared past: departed aunts, uncles and godparents. Others are of unknown people who played a part in her life which I can only guess at.  They are from an age when men wore dinner jackets and women smoked through cigarette holders clasped in gloved hands.  

‘Cigarette holders came in different lengths for different situations. One for the theatre, one for dinner and so on. It was a more elegant age,’ she says pointing at a photograph of my father lighting a cigarette for her. They are at a party in a place she can no longer remember.

The study walls are too small to curate her entire life, of course. Tough choices have to be made. How many pictures to hang of the grandchildren versus husband? Is a photograph of our wedding day necessary when there are so many elsewhere in the house? Making these choices is stressful for her but she’s passed the decisions to me and I feel more like an ignorant museum curator than a caring son. 

Choosing the pictures for her bedroom is a small challenge compared to the sorting the rest of her possessions. We have agreed a plan to sort things into three groups: Keep, Donate or Dump. But she keeps redefining the categories or re-allocating things between them. Overnight one pile grows, another shrinks. It’s a border without customs controls.

I’ve booked a small van to bring her stuff over in two days. At this rate, I’ll need to hire a lorry instead. The whole house will be full of her stuff and tip from a shared home into a Museum for Mother. I wonder if the British Museum have a video, which could help me?

Mother’s Religion is Cakeism

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Mother thinks Boris Johnson is right about cake. She supports having it and eating it like he does. She also tells me no British politician is stupid enough to let the trade negotiations damage the cake supply chain.

‘Cake shortages caused the French revolution. They won’t repeat that mistake. Anyway, Britain survived the War without panettone and we will do so again.’

I wonder when my Remain voting Mother morphed into a Johnson supporting cross between Mary Antionette and Geoffrey Boycott? I can forgive her questionable analysis of the causes of the French revolution but not knowing that panettone is a breaded loaf not a cake is unforgivable.

I am about to confront her with this when I remember I came round only to check she’s OK and not to waste time debating the impact of the Brexit trade negotiations on the global cake supply chain.

I offer to make her a cup of tea, instead. Her fridge is almost empty. A pint of milk sits next to a lemon drizzle cake, a Bakewell tart and four jam donuts. There’s a tin of tomato soup on the top shelf. Unless she is auditioning for an extreme episode of ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ it’s clear her obsession for cake and other sweet things is more than just political.  

I decide it’s time for me to talk to her about getting some balance into her diet.

‘I worried you’re not eating enough,’ I say. ‘When did you start this cake thing?’

‘When did you start being a nosey parker?’ she replies.

Undaunted, I suggest she needs to include whole grains, proteins and more fat in her diet. I say that cakes are not bad per se but should eaten in moderation.

‘We need to make your diet less Willy Wonka and more Yotam Ottolenghi.’

Mother falls silent during my sermon. In fact, she has turned off her hearing aid and jacked up the volume on the TV. It’s so loud the dead could be walking all over West London.

‘You’re becoming a cake addict,’ I shout, irritated at being stonewalled. ‘Don’t you realise the sugar in all those cakes is like having crack cocaine.’

‘If crack cocaine is as good as lemon drizzle cake could I try some?’  she replies.

Fretting over dinner, I explain to the family why they should also feel aggrieved by Mother’s reaction.  

‘It was all for her own good,’ I end.  

There is an embarrassed silence. They’re like ambassadors at a diplomatic reception where Donald Trump has misread the autocue. They don’t know what to say or which way to look.

After a while, my Son speaks.

‘Supermarket cakes come in lots of packaging. If she cuts back on that it has to be a good thing for the environment,’ says Son, showing he values the Gaia in Granny.

There’s another short pause.

‘This an example of the conflict between the individual’s right to eat what they want and the State’s desire to prevent harmful behaviours. You’re Mr Nanny State. Given that Granny doesn’t like being told what to do, I don’t understand why you are surprised at her reaction?’ says my Daughter, in that irritating way undergraduates adopt after their first year at university. 

It’s not the support I was hoping for so I turn, hopefully, to my Wife who is clearing up the plates.

‘Your daughter’s right. The moral of this story is don’t teach your Grandmother to suck eggs’,’ she says. ‘Now, who’d like some pudding?’

Shop with Mother

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I don’t know many men who enjoy clothes shopping. I know even fewer who would risk buying clothes for their wives or girlfriends unsupervised. I did it once and never again want to feel the hopelessness provoked by my Wife asking: ‘Did you keep the receipt?’

I once had a male friend who enjoyed clothes shopping for his girlfriends. He’d even go shopping for their clothes alone. His girlfriends thought his willingness to go clothes shopping with them was proof of his commitment to them. We thought it was a cunning ploy, like a fox pretending to care about the interior design of a chicken coop.

I have not seen this man for thirty years. But I am thinking of giving him a call because Mother wants me to go clothes shopping with her and I want to know if he has any tips on shopping with the older woman. Or better still, if he can come along.  

I have tried to persuade her we do not need to visit the shops. I have explained she can buy clothes on-line and these days everyone offers ‘quibble free returns’, one of the great metrics of an advanced human civilization. But she still insists on going to the shops.

‘Don’t worry. I won’t ask your opinion on anything in front of anyone,’ she says pricking one of my deepest fears.

At the retail park, things are going better than expected. I am getting into the swing of being a bag carrier by saying things like ‘Man-made fabric looks good on you’ and ‘The sale stuff is this way’. But, mostly, Mother wants to plough her own path down the aisles, pleased not to have me fussing nearby.

I have not seen her for a few minutes because I have been entranced by a rack of jeans with elasticated waists. I can hear laughter at the checkout and look over to see an assistant talking very, very slowly and loudly to Mother. There’s a queue of bemused people around her. I walk over.

‘Can I help?’

‘She had a turn when I gave her the bill,’ says the assistant.

‘What’s the matter?’ I ask Mother.

She mouths words but makes no sound. She points to her ears and shakes her head.

‘Is she deaf and dumb?’ asks the assistant.

‘Not when we came in,’ I say.

Mother is tugging my arm. I lean down.

‘Lost my wallet,’ she whispers.

Getting to the front of a shop queue and finding herself unable to pay is one of Mother’s great fears. It is linked to childhood humiliations of seeing her mum and dad fobbing off the rent collector with fake excuses. She actually has nightmares of exactly this scenario.

I pay for the clothes and we leave. Walking to the car, I can’t resist asking if pretending to be deaf and dumb isn’t a little excessive? Couldn’t she just have admitted she had lost her purse and wait for me?

‘Last year, in M&S I pretended to faint. They sent me home in a black cab,’ she says with a slightly wicked smile.

Are these extreme avoidance strategies more common among the old? I remember a friend saying his mother pretended she was going to hospital for a blood transfusion to avoid going to her grand-daughter’s primary school pantomime. Compared to this, playing deaf and mute in M&S seems understated.

The shopping trip is over. We are feeling good despite the drama. We have come away with new clothes, a full set of receipts and without an argument. This is my greatest retail success since I spontaneously bought an omelette pan without consulting my Wife. I can’t help feeling if my old mate had been there, like my guardian retail angel, that he would have been proud of me.

I turn out of the car park and mother tells me to ‘slow down’. We’re doing 10mph.