Pink Drapes

My 88-year-old mother and I spend a lot of time in doctors' offices and waiting rooms.  We perform a pas de deux just getting in the door.  My mother cannot walk, although she insists she's fine, she's fine, so I leap out of the driver's seat, guide her from the car, make her promise to wait on the bench while I park, run in and grab hold of her arm so we can ride the elevator together.

It was a Friday and we knew we were going to hear a diagnosis; we were going to hear a Yes or a No, either one would change our lives. 

 "So we'll go in there," says my mother.

"So we'll go in there and play Russian roulette," I say.

"And we won't care," says my mother.

" I still think you should order the drapes," I say, as I press two.

If they only gave frequent flyer miles for the distance those elevator rides take aging mothers and their Designated Daughters.  In the push of a button we can go from fear to knowing, weighing Yes against No in our too familiar attempt to make peace with either.  We women face finality and imminence together.  Our decision on how to handle it is the only thing we think we can control.

The week before and the week before that, my mom took a battery of blood tests.  She also had a woman come out and measure her bedroom windows for new pink drapes.  The drapes she was going to replace –they had only been hanging for 25 years – matched wallpaper that wasn't there anymore.  This was going to be a splurge, which my mother doesn't do, and then the dastardly blood tests threw a big question mark into her well- deserved plan.

We sit in the examining room, our faces round and blank like Charlie Brown's.  We act like it is a normal visit, with the usual litany of complaints.  All week, we had worked worst case and best case scenarios in our minds and come up with the only possible answer. Acceptance.

"Oh, I forgot to make a list," my mother says and gets a paper and pencil from her purse.  "Lets see, I want to ask him about how tired I am. Fatigue.  And about the echocardiogram.  How am I going to remember this?  Let's make an acronym," she says.  We start to laugh as she writes, "cough," "abdomen" and "lung."  She has spelled FECAL, and we sit and wait for the doctor to come in.

He came in, and gave us our blessed No, our big, fat, Not To Worry.  We feel once again absolved, and a little closer to ready.  We know the day is coming, but today is not that day. 

My mother hasn't ordered the drapes yet.  I wish she would.

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Designated Daughter by D.G. Fulford is the next featured book in the Getting Better All the Time Group. It's a story of how a daughter returns the love she experienced her entire life from her mother. To read more about this book and the others in the group, click here.

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