Betty is currently obsessed with finding the rest of her John Sanford novels in the basement. We still have several dozen boxes of her books down there, but we're finishing the basement, so they have to stay in boxes for the moment. For the 10th time in a few days, she told me she was going to go down there to look for them, and for the 10th time, I explained why she absolutely couldn't. The steps are sleep, uncarpeted, and I have a recurring vision of finding her at the bottom of the steps, bleeding...
So once again, I found myself raising my voice a notch or two and telling her that if I ever found her on those steps, I'd put a lock on every door in the house. She said, "I'll just crawl down, I won't walk." So up another notch I went...
As I may have mentioned in a previous blog entry, her neuropsychologist told me that the only way to make a memory is sometimes to get angry, so I did. It wasn't difficult. The hard part is not yelling ALL THE TIME!
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I am glad you have Betty in your life, it keeps you from yelling at me. I have enough nightmares without adding your soundtrack to it. Oh yeah, don't forget to yell at your kids, they need the memories. You want them to remember their childhood, right?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure a shrieking rant is the memory you want to create for Betty ir yourself. I'd just invest in the door locks and let your mother-in-law be the one to get angry.
ReplyDeleteOoops. I meant "or" not "ir". Speaking of typos, I think you might have written that the stairs are sleep, instead of steep. But it might just be that I need to tell my optometrist this multi-focal contact lens prescription is way off base.
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