Little Things

Today little things remind me of Mom. My husband and I get fancy doughnuts at Westfield after walking around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with friends and their little boys. We get home and have lunch and put our son down for a well deserved nap and we have tea and eat the doughnuts. I'm more of a simple glazed kind of gal or a chocolate iced but my husband has gone for an over the top jam filled monstrosity with icing and a jammie Dodger on top. I tell him I'm not a big fan of filled doughnuts, especially the jam filled kind. I don't mind a chocolate filled one maybe with cream. Then I remember that Tim Hortons used to do this great doughnut called a Boston cream and I remember this used to be one of Mom's favourites. It's a plain doughnut with chocolate icing and filled with custard. My mom was never an indulgent person but she did have a sweet tooth which she readily caved into on the right occasions. She would be driving me back from a dance competition and we would stop and get something sweet at Tim’s. As kids we were never completely banned from eating or drinking anything although we did have strict rules as to when we were allowed to eat things. No pop during the week, just on weekends. Mom never drank pop though. Only two cookies for dessert at lunch and dinner during the week. A bit more leniency on the weekends. Ice cream was allowed for instance. Sometimes doughnuts.

Our son was a delight today. We are getting more days like this. The first three months are definitely the hardest. I know everybody tells you they are but you don’t really understand what they mean until you go through it yourself. I’m not sure I would say I enjoyed the first three months. Maybe the first month is okay because you’re so filled with love and hormones, wondering at this tiny little creature that just eats and falls asleep on you. After that things get more arduous. Constant feeding, changing, nap, repeat, sometimes five times a day. And although they’re cute, they’re still little potatoes at two and three months and don’t give much back. My husband and I had several conversations that went something like this:

“Oh my god, I hate this” “Me too” “I’m so tired” “And bored” “He took 30 mins of bouncing on the exercise ball to get him to go to sleep” “I know” “I think we’ve ruined our lives” “Oh my god why didn’t I think this through more”

After three months things start getting better incrementally. They start responding more to you and reaching out and grabbing things, enjoying new experiences. But by 6 months plus things are seriously better. Our son laughs at us when we make silly noises and play games with him, he loves peekaboo now, squeals with delight when he sees the cat, and has started reaching out for us to be in our arms - wanting either mum or dad, sometimes he can’t decide. He is good natured and seems to be tolerant of all kinds of nonsense that we put him through. Of course he gets grizzly and whiny and needs a cry some times but don’t we all? We’ve given him the nickname Bug or Little Bug. The week we brought him home I just thought he looked as snug as bug in a rug, and was also a little love bug, some times a little stink bug, and so the nickname stuck.

After we put the little Bug to bed, my husband and I are listening to a podcast from the Merseyside Sceptics Society called Be Reasonable. Their guest is neuroscientist turned author Eben Alexander III who wrote the New York Times bestselling book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. It’s the account of his own near death experience and how he tries to process his experience as a neurosurgeon. Mom was reading this book before she died. We’re both listening with interest as we go about preparing bottles, doing the dishes, and our other evening chores. He’s being politely grilled by the hosts of the podcast and I sympathise with him; he’s trying to assert that as a society we need to open our minds more and not get bogged down with the materiality of our created world. But then he’s being asked to back up his claims with material proof. He can’t win.

I freeze and listen intently when he starts talking about patients who are dying, often patients with some form of dementia or mental degradation, having a lucid day right before they die. This happened to Mom. Although it might have been the IV she had been on, I believe it was more than that.

The day before she died my youngest sister woke up to Mom being awake and asking for a touch of honey. This was the first time she’d really said anything and been fully conscious for three days. My sister had been sleeping on her floor beside her bed in order to take care of her if something happened in the night. My youngest sister is a palliative care nurse and cared for mom a lot in the months leading up to her death. She gave her the touch of honey and Mom was propped up to sitting in bed for most of the day happily talking to visitors. A huge bouquet of flowers arrived for her from my friend who cried with me down the phone. We placed them on a chair in front of the bed so she could see them. She thought they were so beautiful. She had a bit of jello and some ice cream. She'd gotten me a pedicure for my birthday the day before so I showed her the results. She told her 90 year old parents that she was going to fight and get better. The next day she would slip into a state of unconsciousness and eventually take her last breath.

It seemed serendipitous that the flowers arrived on the day she was lucid and sitting up in bed. I was so happy she got to see them. Sometimes it's the little things.