A woman once told me, “You are the old woman you are becoming.” In other words, you can’t be a shrew up to age 60 and then expect to become a gracious, kind and gentle senior citizen.
My mother-in-law, Irene, has proved this out. She has always believed that people are more important than things and that the comfort and wellbeing of others is superior to her own. Having lived this way all her life, it’s simply part of her nature now that she is pushing 80.
Other than our mutual love for my husband and my sons, my mother-in-law and I don’t have much in common. She is from Canada, and I am from Texas. Need I say more? But the greatest difference between us is her tendency to save everything and my tendency to save nothing. The joke around our house is, “Keep moving or Mom will take you to the Goodwill.” Irene, on the other hand, once handed me a large ball of used hockey skate laces that her sons had worn 30 years earlier. Just in case.
Just how much of a packrat she is became clear to me this summer when my sister-in-law coerced me into cleaning her mother’s closet. As I was discarding scarves from 1970-something and old programs from long-forgotten nights out, I groused, “Why on earth would someone save all this junk?” I confess I was feeling rather superior thinking of my own streamlined, tidy closet. Then I happened to glance over at her chest of drawers and there next to the baby photos of her three children was a photo of me. From kindergarten. It has been there since I joined the family 26 years ago.
And in one of her drawers is a pile of folders labeled with the names of her children. Each folder contains immunization records and other important documents. And there is a folder with my name on it. I’m not sure what’s in it. But she considers me one of her children and therefore, I get a folder.
Now that I’m older and perhaps wiser, I realize how hard it must have been to watch her youngest son get married to an unknown girl from thousands of miles away. She never let on that she may have preferred a daughter-in-law who shared her culture and her country. I hope I am as gracious if my sons make a similar choice.
This Christmas my in-laws made the long trek to Cincinnati from Vancouver, B.C. Sadly, my mother-in-law is losing her memory and with it, the ability to do tasks that she did for years.
But true to form, she continues to demonstrate that paying attention to what’s going on around you is more important than just getting things done. She doesn’t remember how to make some of the more complicated dishes but she noticed the little house the squirrels are building in the large tree outside the window. She no longer makes the pies. But she notices the lint in the corner of my kitchen and painfully stoops to pick it up because she wants to make sure she’s doing her part.
This year, instead of resolving to lose 10 pounds and get to the gym more often, I will start practicing now to be the old woman I want to be in the future. I might even save some hockey skate laces.
