Birthday Party

     We had a nice birthday party. We all met up at Olive Garden. There were 5 of us. Everyone ordered what they wanted. We relaxed, enjoyed our food and laughed at this and that. There happened to be a woman there that I work with. It was the first time she met my family. She said, " How lucky you are to have a family that enjoys being together."  She, of course does not know the whole story.

   DH tried to call Beth back twice to give her the information he got from me but she did not answer. This is typical. She will let us worry a while especially if she already has another place to stay. When she has no where to go she will call incessantly. The most probable explanation is that she did find somewhere to stay or she is just binging and has sold her phone. That happens a lot too.

     Work has been tough this week. Suffice to say that I have been given a huge project with lots of responsibility with no training. I found a manual to read which contains 62 pages of single spaced instructions which read something like an income tax form. If I screw up, then I may loose my license or the people that I train may loose theirs. Did I mention that this is not fun?

After work today I went over to mom-in law's house like in the old days. I told her I needed some tea and sympathy. I took some raisin bread to make raisin toast. She was having a good day. We ate the toast and drank tea while I told her about my day. We used to do this almost every day when I first got married. In fact, we lived with her for the first 6 months of our marriage while DH and I built our house next door.

Boy was I a dumb 25 year old. I used to come home from work and she had our dinner started. We would have our tea. She would listen to all my school stories and tell me what good work I did. She used to have our laundry folded on our bed each day.  ( That part bothered me because I did not want her to poke around in our room.)  I got along well with my in laws but I was very anxious to move into my own home and do things my own way. I just did not know how good I had it.

Anyhow, I stayed with Elsie today for about 2 hours. We talked about my work, how she misses her husband and the activities that she would like to do again. She said that she started to laugh out loud today .  She was in the hallway and had to go to the bathroom. She could not decide which clean bathroom to use....... the one in the hallway, the one in the master bedroom or the one by the laundry room. She said, I grew up so poor that I never thought I would have the problem of deciding between three bathrooms. I only hoped to have an indoor bathroom!

I found that I could help her read the paper, listen to the radio and e-mail her grand kids. These are all things that she used to be able to do alone. She can not do them alone now but she still enjoys them. It was not that hard to make a few little adjustments so that she still liked these things. For example, she could read the headlines but not the small print. I said which article seems most interesting to you. Then I read her that article. She could pick radio stations that she liked so I wrote them down. She could not figure out how to use the radio so I showed her but I do not think she will remember. She did not want me to label anything that she forgot such as where she keeps her playing cards. She said that it would be like advertising that a person lives here with no brains. I said short term memory is way different than no brains. I offered to label the objects in English and Spanish so that she could inform people that she was studying a new language. She laughed but declined the offer.

I hope to relax tonight and get an early start tomorrow. I have not decided if I will attend my alanon meeting or not. I know I should. To them and you dear friends I owe my sanity or what remains of it.