Skin and Bones

That's just how you're built.

"Well, you should be skin and bones at this point."

My mother says this as she marvels at my activity around the house, in the yard, observing my movement as she has many times since we moved her in with us last year. I am her child, but it's only recently that she's had the opportunity to actually know who I am.

"It's hard to believe you're not just skin and bones, move, move, move. Run, run, run. You're making me tired just watching you!"

At the time of this writing, Mom is 90 years old. In the last few years, the little things that we take for granted as younger folks have become a little more difficult for her to handle on her own. This is a blow for a woman who had been fiercely independent her whole life. As much as she could be, that is, with the expectations placed upon her by circumstance and the timeline she was born into. She had become even more independent out of necessity since my father’s death in 1981.

But she had begun to find some of the day-to-day tasks, tasks which used to come easy to her, nearly impossible complete unassisted, and her eyes, as she says, aren't working so well anymore. Driving had become a challenge. Giving up some of that independence to move in with her daughter ultimately had to be her idea, and after a couple close calls - much too close for someone who lives a six hour drive away from my partner and I - she finally decided to take us up on our proposal that maybe she should be a little closer to us. Preferably under the same roof.

"You work so hard You're always moving," she exclaimed as I tried to fit what should have been three days of labor, household chores we had put off in the hectic past month or so, into the two hours I had left before heading off to work.

"Yup, busy busy," I chuckled, a bead of perspiration rolling down my right cheek, my sweaty shirt clinging to my body.

"Well you SHOULD be skin and bones by now."

She said this again - approvingly? She was praising me, the work I do around the home we now share, and the work I do once I leave the house for my job, which she also commented on regularly. She was proud of me.

Her voice also carried a tinge of disappointment; maybe she was disappointed for me, because obviously I should be much happier if I were, in fact, skin and bones.

She would be happier for me.