Mashed Potatoes?

I went to visit yesterday during lunch, my least favorite time to be there. If I am being totally honest, and what's the point of being anything else when writing, the smells and sounds and sight of all of the old people eating grosses me out. It always smells like urine and brown gravy. My grandmother constantly tries to feed me or my kids if we are there during a meal. At least ten times in as many minutes I had to politely tell her them my two year old son who was squirming in my lap in fact did not want any of her mashed potatoes or creamed spinach. And no, neither would I like you to give him any of the ginger ale from your tiny wine glass. And like a magician, she manages to pull a small  brush out from behind her back and begin to try and comb through the halo of knotty ginger hair surrounding his face. Perhaps if he had napped he would have been more receptive to this, but I doubt it. Hair brushing is on the top of his two year old shit list, right up there with mittens and getting his face wet.

It was one of the more exhausting trips for me. A nursing home is a difficult place to bring children, something I am figuring out first hand. I know I need to learn to accept where she is at right now in her life and not need it to be different, not need her to be someone she simply is not. She is happier now than she was a year ago. She no longer asks to go home or clings to you when you hug her. She does not grasp what her life before the nursing home was and I am painfully aware at what a blessing this really is.

And as always, I am grateful that at least for now, when I walk into that diningroom that offends all my senses, she looks up and smiles and still knows who I am. And she looks happy. And that is all I can ask for.