I recognize the breakfast stir...
...in my mother's awakening rustles. While I post this entry I'll be preparing breakfast and greeting my mother to another day, so this may take some time to get out.
    My mother is a breakfast person, and a person of breakfast habit. Her preferred daily breakfast would be waffles, occasionally Belgian, with lots of butter and pure maple syrup, maybe some sausage or bacon on a separate plate, definitely ham if you've got it, strong black coffee (although she has decaffeinated herself) and good conversation. She also loves eggs, especially hard over with lots of pepper, and bacon, toast with butter, and orange juice is a must (and will remain a must, since I recently discovered that the lack of orange juice, when we were controlling for potassium, also promotes bowel accidents), so this is her typical daily breakfast. She has become so inured to it that when it is occasionally altered (say I mix some of the fresh pesto left over from the previous night in with the eggs, or I dispense with eggs in favor of cottage cheese, toast and V-8 juice) she questions my culinary wisdom.
    Today I discovered she is remembering that we still have a gift certificate to See's for one pound of candy, which was given to us Christmas before last by a well meaning friend who thought that, surely, See's would have diabetic candy (they didn't, although I don't know if they still don't). My mother, however, has not forgotten the gift certificate. Last night, in the peak of spirits, she suggested that today might be a good day for "a walk around the mall in the direction of See's." Since it has become relatively easy to control her access to sweets and, as her diet has changed her sweet tooth has also become much less insistent (she actually has episodes where I catch her refusing dessert or a sweet treat at someone's house with the words, "...no thank you, I've never been a dessert person..."), I don't worry about having a few sweets in the house. When her blood sugar is dipping, in fact, refined sugar becomes a treatment. I just have to whisk the sweet away when she threatens to devour our entire supply in one sitting. Although she often forgets her sweet tooth, it still responds to the proximity of sugar.
    At any rate, this post is primarily for me. As I continue producing and directing my mother's breakfast experience, I am entertaining ideas on how to present my mother's and my together history. I want to record some of the ideas here so that I'll remember to work on them.
    I've decided to change direction amid stream. This morning's breakfast will be bacon, egg and cheese on toast. My mother will be scandalized.
    Yes, my mother and I eat differently, although as I experiment with her nutritional regimens I experiment with myself. My mother is an unabashed carnivore. Her new campaign tactic is to quote a recently viewed factoid from a Discovery Channel show mentioning that eating meat was a substantial factor in the hominid evolutionary development of intelligence (what she chooses to retain is sometimes annoying). Although I was smitten with meat early in life, I got away from it, except as flavoring, for years. It has been only recently that I've been carefully incorporating more meat into my diet. I'm a big vegetable, fruit, grain and cheese eater, though I've always been suspicious of 'sweet'. My mother would prefer it if vegetables didn't exist. She could be said to be a grain person, if you include refined white bread, and certainly a fatty dairy person. Thus, I still shop for one when it comes to vegetables, mostly, and shop for one and a half when it comes to meat. We've both compromised to each other's likes, and to my mother's diabetes, which is okay with me. When she is on a severe, short term regimen, I simply eat what she's eating, as such a regimen usually means we have to rid the house of anything outside of the restrictions since my mother prefers not to remember the ever changing detail of what she "can" and "can't" eat, and the back closet can store only so much food.
    I do, by the way, occasionally wonder if my use of my memory on her behalf may somehow encourage her memory to slack off without psychosomatic reason. I've been very wary, though, in offering myself on behalf of her memory. I usually let us get into minor trouble before I begin to take over. For instance, she overdrew us at the bank one month, to the tune of a couple thousand dollars, before I took hold of her check book. I'd noticed and commented on her seat-of-the-pants management of her money previous to the incident, and she had not taken kindly to my observations. She is a chiefly empirical woman, though, and it took only one startling overdraw for her to gratefully relinquish the household accounting tasks. She considered it a relief, and we were none the worse for the wear.
    Okay. Regarding the posting of our history, as gleaned from emails and notes I've written. As I continue with this journal I'm realizing that the volume of material from posting, alone, is probably overwhelming to those readers who know me, let alone those who don't. This is the reason I decided to add a site search engine. However, considering the stream-of-consciousness nature of both posting to a daily journal and constructing a history from dated letters and notes, haphazard organization is probably not a good idea. I cannot imagine even someone who is extremely interested in me wanting to wade through all the material already uploaded, let alone what is to come.
    Part of the problem is that, in order to save time, I decided to utilize my ISP's auto website builder, a distinctly inflexible device, to throw pages up. Although it has been efficient, it has also been maddening as organizational ideas for my history postings that will make it easy for readers to peruse topics and click directly to anecdotes or information they might find useful, rather than plowing through everything, require more use of space than these templates, I'm discovering, will allow. This is why you may be noticing that I am varying page templates, although this doesn't seem to be helping. So, over the next week or so I'm probably going to sink my hands into from-scratch page design, again, as I figure out a way to present thumbnail sketches of material for easy perusal by my readers.
    In the meantime, the search engine is startlingly useful and, as soon as I finish this, I am going to re-spider to include the uploaded 1999 history.

My Caretaking Journal Manifesto (1st Draft):
My fundamental purpose in establishing and maintaining this journal is to break the isolation of the caretaking experience within our immediate circle by offering our loved ones a window into our living detail. As I post to this journal I most often think about my sisters and their children. I think of how busy and involved their lives are, how busy and involved my mother's and my lives are, and I think that, when they are ready for a breather, if they come to this site, they can be assured that they will not miss anything and will recognize us and fall easily into our arms and our routines when we are again face to face.
- posted by gail rae @ 11:29   email...this post