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I am again behind in my postings. It's been busy, but as I think I've said before, it becomes harder and harder to write. Emotionally it pulls everything out of me to go back into the experience, even if it hasn't been a particularly interesting visit. But I guess that's what therapy is about, and that's what this blog is for me.

I have actually visited twice since my last post...not enough, but there you go. This was a picture I took with my phone on the first of those visits.

Mother has always loved animals--she gave that to me--and I'm guessing that, for her, this day somewhere in the late 1930's was a good day. When I arrived for my second visit, one of the aides greeted me, as she was just getting Mother up from the lunch table. "She's having a good day," the aide said, "she fed herself." I swallowed hard.
 

It has been way too long since I last visited my mother. I did visit once since my last post, but I find it harder and harder to re-live the visits in my posting. I read to her from the Bible on my last visit. No sign of recognition. I did the 23rd Psalm, which she recited from memory at her father's funeral in 2004. Nothing.

I haven't been as delinquent a daughter as my lack of recent postings would indicate. I've been up to The Birches 5-6 times since my last post, but with changing jobs, lifestyles, and moving, I just haven't written about it.

In that time, the visits started very bad and then got better. The earliest visit was a couple of weeks before Easter. I found Mother in the activity room, which was crowded with both residents and relatives as a guest performer led the residents in some singing and handed out rhythm instruments.

Finally, in keeping with the title of this blog, I visited on a Monday!

I arrived mid-afternoon and Mother was seated at a table in the dining room. I came in and said hello. She made no response. I gave her a kiss and she looked at me with a blank look. I sat down at the table, glad no one was there to ask who this was that was visiting. One woman was across from her, but soon she had a visitor and they moved to another table.

I'm struck by Mother's room...how more and more it is becoming the room of a little child.  We had to get an extra piece of furniture to accommodate her roommates that you see here.

Of course that may or may not be what she would have done with her room, but people bring her stuffed animals...ever larger ones...and so they need a home. She seems to enjoy them, and they enjoy her back.

On to Thanksgiving. Actually, there's not much to report. Sadly, this year we were separated from the rest of the residents and were down in the private dining room. It's very nice, but I miss being with the other residents and their families. Rob was missing, as he was enjoying Thanksgiving on an airplane to Missouri for work. Stephanie came, as did Marie and the boys, David, Laurie, and me. We came, we ate, we went home. (If I were a bit more ambitious, I'd put that in Latin, but it's getting late.)
 

Mother began her work as an English teacher at Coventry High School in the 1960's. This is a picture of her at Coventry High in 1975, a year before I graduated. By then she had moved from teaching English to being a guidance counselor. She retired from there in 1989.