Earlier today I gave my mother...
...10 mg furosemide. Her feet aren't swelling but there was something about the way her slacks fit her around her belly this morning...it just seemed like she might be retaining water in her torso without it yet affecting her feet or face. I figured, 10 mg wouldn't hurt, especially during the day. I'll just make sure she stays hydrated and changes her paper underwear often.
    She's been reasonably lively and active. It's a "hair day", and I expected that she might want to go out to lunch. She didn't, but she didn't nap until about 45 minutes ago, in the livingroom, in the sun, her cat self napping, and now she's up, mentioning that she's glad she didn't sleep through Oprah.
    I'll be uploading (slowly, probably, well, I'm not sure...I've set up a data sort and transfer method to deal with all the material and 2000 was sorted out and uploaded pretty quickly) 2001 soon. I'd say there is about three times as much material for that year as there was for 2000. I wrote more people more often. Most of the entries are from emails, although some are from letters and some from notes that later became emails.
    Oh! This is interesting! I've been obliquely watching Oprah. It was a segment centered around a woman who wrote Oprah that her husband had lost his romanticism after 10 years of marriage. I wasn't paying attention and would have completely trashed anything I'd heard except that, when the segment was over, ending with the husband successfully recapturing the romance in the couple's marriage, my mother rose from her chair, turned to me at the computer with visible tears in her eyes (a shock in itself) and said, referring to the show (I quickly realized), "Well, that's nice, but it would have been even nicer if Dad had done some of those things for me."
    I was surprised. I guess Dad didn't do much in that area, although he was incredibly sentimental, the most sentimental of the two and perhaps the most sentimental in the family. He loved celebrations, tried and true or impromptu, was into affectionate nicknames and hauling out family stories at the most inappropriate times then misting up over them, but wasn't ever the producer of calendar events, although he was a willing participant in creation.
    The tears didn't last more than a minute. She was wiping them away as she talked to me. I don't think I was meant to notice them. "I guess Dad wasn't very good at that, was he," I said.
    "Most men aren't," she said, shaking her head and returning to her rocking chair. "I know MPBIL isn't. I'll bet MCS's husband and MFS's husbands aren't, either."
    Wow. I didn't realize how important romantic expression is to my mother and how awkward my father was with it, even though he fairly boiled with passion about practically everything including my mother.
    I've always been lucky, in a way; most of my lovers have been far more sentimental than me. I tend to be more verbal, especially written, with my romantic expression, but it rarely follows a calendar. I never realized that my mother is a calendar person when it comes to romantic expression. Too bad none of us ever picked up on that and clued Dad into what we were doing and that it might be nice, on occasion, if he'd done it all, himself, just for his wife. He did take her out fairly often but, I don't know, I guess he was missing something. Maybe it was the element of surprise. I recall him discussing with her all his anniversary presents to her pre-gifting and ad infinitum. Maybe that had something to do with my mother's dissatisfaction with his romantic technique.
    Interesting.
- posted by gail rae @ 14:32   email...this post