This weekend was pretty crazy. Not anything bad, but just stuff happening constantly. I was away from the house almost all the time, except when I was sleeping. I hardly ate any meals at home. In a twist that surprises no one, this means I didn’t make the best possible choices about food. Delicious choices, yes. But a little too rich for my body to be happy with me. By Sunday evening, I needed to let things settle down.
So when I was offered some meat at the dinner table, I asked for a very small piece. The woman sitting next to me smiled and asked, “Not much of a meat eater?”
Which is an unremarkable snippet of small talk, if you’re sitting to someone you’ve just met. I was sitting next to my mother.
A lot of things about dementia are really upsetting. Sometimes devastating. That wasn’t the case here; I didn’t feel hurt or sad. It was just a little surreal to be making polite stranger chit-chat with my mother over mashed potatoes.
Hello, I’m your daughter. Have we met?