I love my mother. At times she has had a very rough life, but she has always tried to do the best she could for her children. She will be 85 next month and for the last six months or so she has become very confused and has started making some errors in judgment. Some of the errors are frightening, others are funny and exasperating.
The most frightening thing she has done is give out her personal banking information over the phone, 3 times. Once it became clear that she was not going to receive anything in return for the money she gave out to this one company, not once, but twice, we were able to get her money back from the bank, those mistakes were in the amount of $390 each. This last time a different company took $29.95. I told her that I was done dealing with these mistakes and my brother could take over. She never writes down what she is supposedly getting for the money she gives these people, but I know that the first company was selling “premium healthcare cards” under the ploy that it would help with Medicare D. Medicare D has brought out some real scam artists.
The latest mistakes have been funny, but oh my, are they time consuming and exasperating. Mom likes things to be clean, and she is always cleaning. Unfortunately, she lost the sight in one eye years ago, and so her cleaning can be hit and miss. Now that confusion has been added to the mix, well, things can really get interesting.
Last weekend mom decided to mop the kitchen floor. When I talked to her on the phone Saturday morning she said that the stuff she had used on the floor had not performed as well as she had hoped. She couldn’t remember what the cleaning agent was, but she assured me it was definitely for floors. Hu and I went to her apartment Saturday evening to deliver her groceries and share some pizza with her that we had picked up on the way. When I walked into the kitchen with a laundry basket full of groceries, my feet flew out from under me. I was able to keep from hitting the floor, and push the basket onto the counter, but I was plenty perplexed. Hu was right behind me and I yelled for him to stay out of the kitchen. Mom started chuckling in the living room. I was not happy.
Once I had gotten over that weird feeling you get when you have avoided a situation you know would have hurt, I looked down at the floor. I had left sliding marks in some kind of goo on the floor. I asked mom if she had spilt something and she said “no, that she had told me that the soap for the floor did not perform well.” I immediately asked her what cleaning agent she used. She told me it was right there on the counter and to look for myself. I did look, and there it was right on the counter, a bottle of concentrated Palmolive dish soap, the kind that says Oxy clean.
I was still confused, why wouldn’t a little dishwashing liquid in a bucket clean the floor? I asked mom how she used the soap. She said that she has squirted it on the floor and then mopped it around and it made the floor slick, but that when she tried to put water on it there were just suds. I almost sat down and cried, but instead I told everyone to sit down and eat the pizza while it was hot.
It took that evening, and another two days before Hu and I were able to get all of that soap up off the floor. The first evening was just scraping and wiping with rubber spatulas and paper towels, because mom was right, you couldn’t put water on that soap. (She used over ½ a bottle, Sam’s Club size.) Hu and I disposed of all the dishwashing liquid and then made sure she didn’t have more since she puts everything in the dishwasher we figured she could get by without it, but might break her neck with it. The other two days we poured white vinegar on the floor and wiped it up until no more suds appeared.
This Saturday, yesterday, February 17, 2007, I received a call from my friend that helps me by cleaning areas of mom’s apartment that really need to be scrubbed regularly. She said that mom had put a cup of dishwashing liquid in the dishwasher, there were suds every where, and she did not know what to do. Well, I was experienced with this type of cleaning mistake, mom had done the same thing over the summer. I told my friend I would be there as soon as I could get there, and out the door I went with salt and vinegar. The salt dissolves the suds, and the vinegar was in case the floor was slick again.
I love that my mom still wants to have a clean apartment, clean clothes, and wants to do it herself, and I know that her mother taught her that cleanliness was next to godliness, but right now, to me, cleanliness is definitely nest to insanity, mine, not mom’s. She is just confused.
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