Life with the parents..
My husband is going doolally trying to live with my parents. I’m a space cadet, but at least I can be impolite enough to get it off my chest and move on. There’s also an awareness as an adult you don’t have as a child, or even as a teenager. Even at 16 I would never have counted the glasses of wine my mother drank, and wondered… Is she? I don’t remember listening to the sound of early morning phlegm being expectorated, or time-and-space contorting snores ripping through the house.
I find myself irritated, like you can be with children, at my mother’s refusal to admit she is going deaf, and as a result nodding pleasantly to half of what she hears even if it is about the slaying of children not half an hour from their house.
And as all this goes on, what breaks my heart, what is bothering me the most, is I can see how old they are. Living far away I carried a younger memory of them, it was imprinted in my mind, and I didn’t see the changes. Now, I look over my father’s shoulder as he checks his blood pressure in the morning. (Lidl sell blood pressure gauges) And I casually lift the box of wine in the morning to check the damage - (yes people, my mother is fond of wine boxes, the fact that I’m even still asking ‘is she?’ is a nod to my denial) and I catalogue the changes in my head and I can’t for a second ever imagine them not being here.
Even as they do my head in.
Every day I’m here I realise how fucking annoying they are, and how close I am to loosing them forever.
