Grandmother’s House

The every-other-year trip to sunny Oklahoma to visit with Grandma (great-grandma to my grandkids) was quite the stressful situation this year, which is the year my hubby’s and my sole remaining parent turns 87. She was hospitalized for ten days a couple of months ago with a terrible case of food poisoning – we don’t buy the ‘flu’ excuse, it wasn’t flu – and we flew our daughter out there to stay with her when she got out because we couldn’t take the time off. Daughter made arrangements for home health care, which she needs because she lives alone in a too-big house. The one her mother bought just off Main Street, which survived the tornado that took out the hotel a block in front and the Presbyterian Church a block behind. Back when my hubby was 8 years old and Norma and Clint ran the hotel.

She has also lost sight in one eye, so needed someone to take her car keys away for public safety’s sake. This also makes her depth perception non-existent, and has led to a series of nasty falls that have us and her other son’s family who lives about 45 minutes away most paranoid. Her friends and neighbors love her, but don’t want to be the ones to discover her dead one day alone in that big house, but she’s stubbornly clung to her independence since her husband of 50 years died over a decade ago.

Luckily she has very tough bones, product no doubt of her youthful career as a Rodeo Queen – champion barrel racer – and the number of times she’d been bucked off her horse. But it’s inevitable that one of these days she’s going to break something, and all her choices will be gone. That would be a very sad end to a wonderfully storied life, and not something we would ever wish upon her. So our job was to unite with the rest of the family and try hard to convince her that she should go into a nice assisted living facility less than a minute away from #2 son.

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As Beautiful as those TV Mamas!

I encountered a post on the PopCrunch blog this past week, The 15 Hottest TV Moms of All Time, which if you don’t remember what life on planet earth was like before there was television, might be forgiven its “all time” hyperbole.

We do know that casting roles of 30 to 40-something actresses for television fills in the entertainment media ‘wasteland’ in between honest-to-starlet status as a Sweet Young Thing and the usual grandmother roles older actresses can get if anyone in Hollywood remembers their names when they get that old. These glamorous middle-age women all radiated a certain ageless beauty from the small screen that made them memorable, and for some, allowed them to move gracefully into the older-lady roles.

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Filed under Beauty, Entertainment, Famous Moms, Grandma Time, Humor, Recipes, Skin Care | Comment (1)