This weekend we will be celebrating my great uncle’s 100th birthday at a local botanical garden.

It will be 39° with rain/snow showers.

My mom is totally freaking out about it. Not because of the weather. Because she is my mom. Because she has taken on the project of planning and organizing the details, and distributing the information among the family members and has turned the project into a giant monstrosity that will be the death of her. Everything must be perfect, everything must be planned, and everything must be within budget.

She is stressing out about it so much that she wakes up at 4:30 every morning and can’t get back to sleep. So she gets up and starts working. Working around the house, at her desk, in the garden. And runs herself ragged so that by evening time she can barely function. And there’s not much anybody can do to help her because nobody else understands why certain details are SUCH. A BIG. DEAL. But it’s as though she is physically incapable of slowing herself down.

When she’s not party planning, she’s lifting and hauling and planting things in her garden, despite the fact that she’s still recovering from a leg injury incurred on a recent skiing trip. So when I talk to her in the evenings, she can hardly move because her body is so worn out and sore. And she’ll agree that she completely overdid it and that it was stupid. But then she’ll get up and do it again the next day. She’s determined that she has to get all this STUFF planted immediately because…I don’t know.

My aunt and uncle are coming tomorrow and will be staying with my parents. So my mom is freaking out because she can’t finish making the curtains and window pillow for the guest room before they arrive. As though they’ll ever notice that the room is missing a pillow. But it’s a goal she has set for herself in her head and not being able to accomplish it makes her a failure.

She can’t find a file that my aunt sent her in an email like 3 years ago. My aunt lost the file, so she asked my mom for a copy so suddenly it becomes my mom’s problem and when I walked into her study this evening she was completely stressing out because she didn’t have the slightest idea where to start looking for such a thing. I told her this was a completely different computer that what she had 3 years ago and there was no way that file still existed. She agreed that it wasn’t really her problem and that she would just have to tell my aunt “too bad” but her stress level seemed only to increase at that point. As we were exiting the office, she pointed at a pile of bank statements and started bemoaning her failure to keep up with the finances.

She was fading in and out of conversation tonight and walking around like her joints were made of concrete.  It was starting to feel like perhaps SHE was the one turning 100.

Tonight I brought her some bath minerals and a facial mask and foot cream and insisted that she spend at least 30 minutes in a warm bath doing NOTHING. She promised me she would, but I have my doubts.

Will somebody please come tie my mother to a chair before she self-destructs? I’m really looking forward to the celebration with my great uncle, but I can’t wait for this weekend to be over.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Because We're Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.