She’s back!

MUM has arrived.

From England. For a month. Unstoppable as a supertanker, but slightly smaller.

I thought they’d have to remove some seats from the aircraft to accommodate her, but when she came through customs into the arrivals lounge – she’d shrunk. I guess that happens when you’re 86 and you’ve got osteoporosis, arthritis, diabetes, an ingrowing toenail and a memory like a goldfish.

She’s here, but I think her brain, like her luggage, is in Bangkok.

It’s been two years seen we saw her, and she’s changed. Last time, we occasionally ferried her about in a wheelchair, when her legs were tired. Now she occasionally — rarely — walks, because not just her legs, but her entire body (and her mind) is always tired.

She arrived with two suitcases. One for her clothes and one for her pills. She takes 23 every day. Six hundred ninety while she’s here, not including painkillers. She has enough of those to fell a herd of wildebeest, but she’s only allowed to take eight a day because they’re the strongest on the market. Any more and she might never wake up.

Sometimes I wonder if she wouldn’t prefer that.

She’s been here a week now. I’ve waited two hours every morning after her morning cup of tea while she gets dressed.

Help her? Of course I’d help her! But this is my mum we’re talking about. We don’t discuss subjects like sex – and in my mother’s culture getting dressed comes under the general heading of sex. I mean, it involves underwear, and arcane items of apparel that are beyond my wildest comprehension. So she gets dressed without help.

Likewise at the end of the day. She goes to bed at 10pm but she starts the process at 6pm. I stand at the bedroom door every 15 minutes and ask if she’s okay, just in case she’s tried to hold on to something impermanent and has her bum wedged in the toilet. Or her head.

I’m allowed in when she’s in her nightie and dressing gown, to tuck her in. This involves swinging her legs very cautiously and gently onto the bed and then waiting while she slowly edges her way towards the centre, so she won’t fall out in the night.

You haven’t seen a hero until you’ve watched my mum cope with life. She’s not alone, I know, but she’s mine, and when I watch the implacable fortitude with which she struggles through every day to achieve what most of us achieve in 30 seconds, I begin to understand the extraordinary power of the human will to survive.

There’s only two choices… you cry about it, or you laugh.

Yesterday she got ready for bed, and when I went to tuck her in four hours later she was fully dressed – in a new set of clothes.

“What are you doing, Mum?”

“Getting up.”

“But it’s nearly midnight.”

“It can’t be! I was asleep for hours before I came in here to go to the loo.”

“That was in front of the television, Mum. Now it’s bedtime.”

“I’ve only been here a week, and you’re already making me stay in bed in the mornings!”

Next she’ll be accusing us of trying to poison her.

Of course, by then, it might be true.

She was here in time for 86th birthday. We had a cake with all the candles. We had children and grandchildren and great grandchildren and a permit from the rural fire brigade. We had a lot of fun. I think she did, too. She ate the birthday cake — chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate filling — and we all looked at each other as much as to say: “Should we be allowing this, with her diabetes?”

And she saw what we were thinking. “If I can’t enjoy myself now and then, what’s the point?” she said.

No one had a convincing argument to the contrary.