if you don't eat your vegetables you can't have dessert (11/14/12)

and when it’s broken glass… who wouldn’t eat their green beans.

I get to play mom to my mom now-a-days. I go up three days a week and try to get the right before lunch.That way the staff gets one less person to deal with. My mother is one of the better ones but she still needs the help occasionally. They give her meals fancy names but chicken is chicken and they grind up all her meats anyway. I’m not sure why but it comes out all ground up. Usually she gets three bowls of food. Meat, starch, veggie. We put the bowls in certain spots, her cranberry juice always on one side, her veggies on the other, her meat at her left hand and her potatoes or rice at the other. She won’t eat the vegetables. No matter how many times I ask her to, she refuses to eat them. Today I tried to switch her bowls but for a blind old bat she sure does know when I move something. Good thing she can’t ground me because I racked up the dirty looks today.

We have a routine. Mom likes routines. I get there, she complains for 20 minutes, lunch is served and the whining stops. Usually. She always has it in for one of the staff. I think it gives her a sense of power to complain. She has no real control over anything in her life. I never knew why the elderly always seemed so unhappy. Now I get it. I can’t blame them. I’d be unhappy if I didn’t get to control anything any more and people were telling me what to do. To go from bossing your kids around to being treated like a child. No thank you.

Today I tried to get her to eat a few green beans. She refused. I was about to bribe her when it occurred to me that it really doesn’t matter if she eats her damn beans. She’s eighty frikkin seven. If we were in Alaska she’d be in the ‘board big ice cubes here’ line.

Still, the stubborn in me came out and I went with one last threat..

“Mom if you do not eat your beans you will not get dessert.”

if you ever have kids and need a threat, keep one thing in mind … do not make a threat unless you think the other party actually wants what you’re holding over their head. Know the enemy. I failed to do that. Apparently today’s dessert was broken glass. The woman who tried to kill us with JELLO now won’t eat disgusting JELLO concoctions. Broken glass is red, green, and orange JELLO chunks folded into vanilla pudding.. Geh.

Our biggest problem is the Alzheimer’s. She is not able to discern when things happen. She can’t remember what she had for dinner the night before, hell..sometimes not even 5 minutes after eating it but she sure can remember everything that ever went wrong for her up there. She just thinks it happened now. We’re muddling through this mess.

Today it was one thing and next time it will be something else and every time I go up a little bit more of her is missing. However, knowing her, she’ll remember and  end up grounding me for trying to make her eat her green beans. At least I really really hope so.