I recognize that this blog won’t happen until I can make space for it. In the same way, exercise won’t happen until I prioritize me. It’s just so hard right now and my habits are shit. Today was the first day that I did not see any family member. Most importantly, it’s the first day that I didn’t go visit my mom. I don’t feel great about it. I don’t feel good about it. I can’t communicate with her. She doesn’t use the phone. She has a flip phone, which I dutifully left on her nightstand, plugged in, for almost a week. Then we saw her doctor. A new doctor for her, less than a week after she arrived in Houston. In Houston, getting a good doctor, like a really good doctor, is incredibly easy. I expected to be there an hour or so last Monday and we were there for almost four. After meeting with the technician, we met with the Fellow (an MD who’s trying to specialize in Gerontology), and then we met with the Social Worker, and finally the doctor. That was before waiting for an x-ray and MRI of my mom’s shoulder and elbow. We were trying to figure out why she’s not using her right arm, at all. Not to hold suspense, we think it’s frozen shoulder. Back to the phone though. The social worker administered a cognitive assessment and after she finished, told me my mom had scored a 13 out of 30. That’s not good. I don’t know why it matters except that it probably sets expectations for family members. She can do math better than your average store clerk but today she thought she was about 60 years old and the year is 1970. She’s almost 87 and you know what year it is. She knows me. She knows she has three kids and she recognizes us. She doesn’t know how many grandchildren she has, but that probably makes sense since she hasn’t had much contact with them in the last twenty years. She doesn’t know where she is today, what city or state, but she knows she’s tired and she uses her right arm to sleep. That’s what she told the doctor. She, a right-handed highly competent human and she needs her right arm to sleep. She doesn’t remember moving just two weeks ago. She doesn’t remember being pushed down or locked out of her room or strangled. And maybe that’s a good thing. She does know she’s lonely. She doesn’t share that with the doctor but she shares that with me another time. That she wishes she knew people better at her new place of living where she’s now been for two weeks and three days and where I didn’t visit at all today. Back to the phone. “It’s too hard,” said the social worker. She doesn’t use it because it’s too hard. She’s had this phone for months but there are no contacts in it. I glean that she has never used it and she will never use it. The next chance I have I call AT&T and I cancel her line and post the phone on Facebook Marketplace, along with so many other pieces of their lives that we brought back from North Carolina in the packing and moving frenzy that was early January. More on that another time, but it’s hard to not visit your mom, whom you’ve plucked from her home in the Outer Banks and moved to Texas, when she doesn’t use a phone.