Thank heaven for little girls.

After a very long, motion sickness-inducing ride on the bus, I arrived in the city of my birth at around 6:15 p.m. and made my way to Little Princess’ office, where she brewed me a cup of chai and continued working on her very complex math until it was time to go to the restaurant where we were to meet her BF and others. I wasn’t paying much attention to my chai, and at one point I put the cup to my lips and almost, but didn’t quite, drank a fly drowning in the hot tea. That was kind of gross.

We were accompanied by my daughter’s office mate, another astrophysics Ph.D. student, and found ourselves at a restaurant where I had been once before when I met another Diarylander during that week when my brother and I were cleaning out my mom’s house, ringostarr. Little Princess’ BF had a table already and a pitcher of beer, and we ordered food and were eventually joined by other friends. We ate, drank, listened to live music, and had a very nice time. It was quite late when we got back to the apartment, and even then I could not sleep in very late this morning.

I wish I had been able to get more sleep because today turned out to be exhausting. I got to the retirement home in time join my mother for lunch (I hadn’t eaten anything at all up to that point and was both famished and parched) and then spent the rest of the afternoon with her.

It was not a good day. Her sense of reality shifted very frequently. Sometimes she was aware of her situation, and then moments later she was totally delusional. It made me very tired. I took her out for a walk, and her arthritic knee was so bad that we had to turn around and go back after half a block. Buddy Boy arrived at around 4:30 and that was a welcome change of scenery. We were joined by Little Princess after we’d already sat down in the dining room.

Dinner was strange. My mother got on one track about a cousin of hers, convinced that she knew us through him. She would not accept that I was her daughter. In fact, it was difficult to convince her that she had a daughter. She kept thinking that this was the first time we were meeting.

This persisted even after supper when we brought her back to her room. If my kids hadn’t been there to keep me laughing, I would have been pretty upset. But just as we were leaving, when I hugged her, she looked at me and said, “You’re my tochter!” and I said, “Yay! I’m real again!”

We went back to Little Princess’ place where the three of us sat around and had a few drinks before Buddy Boy left to go home. I’m afraid that if I lived here and visited my mother regularly I would be drinking every night.

I go back tomorrow and do it all over again.

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