SHE’S SO CUTE!

It’s what I’ve been hearing for the last two weeks about my mom. As she lays in her new home, taking her meds and trying to eat her pureed food. The nurses come into her room, call her by her first name, greet her pleasantly and tell me under their breath how they love her, how cute she is, and how happy she seems!

Of course this is a far cry from her younger days when she was using the business end of her wooden spoons, when she mastered the technique of precision bombing long before the Air Force figured it out. The sound of wood hitting wood as I got pulverized somehow doesn’t compute with what the nurses say.

Now this must be a family trait, since I hear those same things said about my daughter Ellen. As you know Ellen lives in a home for developmentally and physically disabled people. Ellen makes friends with just about everyone, day care people, teachers, doctors and nurses, and even me. But just like her grandmother, don’t cross her, because if you do, she will try to dismember you while trying to set a new record for her in terms of how long it took.

Ellen is a sweetheart, always smiling when she is not eating, something she got from me, but between my mother and my daughter stands me, the recipient of many moments of doom. When Ellen gets to know you, she runs over to you, and you get hugged, almost to extinction. She gives you a bright big smile and clap hands and then the hugs once more.

Now mom once she knows you gives you coffee. In my family as a rule, if you went to any aunt’s house, or sister’s house, you visit: you get coffee, the hospitality beverage that you better take. If you stayed too close to dinnertime, you were invited to stay. This was a cue for you to get ready to be nagged into staying and eating, and so stayed you did.

I often think that my daughter would have been a loving mom, tough as nails and a perfectionist, just like her grandmother, and discipline would have been her middle name.

But, oh how cute!