Sugar on a Wednesday

My husband has been on holidays this past week and we seem to be renegotiating how things are dealt with in respect to his mother. As old as a parent gets, I guess, they are still a parent and one is still a child--despite the actual ages involved. This brings us, of course, to the topic of sugar.

It's so funny, one thinks, to read me constantly complain about how my mother-in-law is eating me out of house and home; for heaven's sake, she is almost 100, how much can she really eat? When it comes to normal, everyday sorts of things like bread and butter, the matriarch is probably healthier than the average 99 year old floating around; when it comes to sugar, the woman is incredible. She eats sugar on all fruit, desserts, puddings--you name it. This house goes through a lot of sugar. My husband tends to link the children's baking with this vast consumption. I know that is not so but I say nothing. I mean I am really silent on the issue. He thinks what he wants and I do what has to be done and the matriarch just plows through our pantry and everyone seems to get along....Until the day we run out of sugar.

It's a Wednesday. I bought a 2 pound of sugar bag last Friday and it is gone. It is gone in the very real sense of empty sugar bowls and vacuous containers and my husband getting his mother her fruit for the evening and wondering why there is no sugar. He's been home. He knows the children have made bread this week, not cookies or cakes or ice cream. He knows I have been having a fit over other uncontrollable concerns and not eating anything. He knows his mother has been the receptacle of all things sweet lately; he knows because when he is off, it is the one thing he must do--get her fruit and sugar. He brought a bowl of fruit up to her room and she sent it back down wondering where the sugar was. Ever seen a grown man in a panic?

At nine o'clock in the evening, he didn't feel like going out to the store. So he stood there wondering what to do...

I suggested icing sugar.

Now, my husband looked at me and made a face and reacted with words to the effect of "She couldn't possibly want that..."

Things have been a bit tense lately. It's not so much the matriarch is a burden but more my burden. My husband has expectations for how things should be for his mother, which is fine, but he doesn't seem willing to do his fair share to carry some of the load. And, I have told him as much. Yes, I know having to do lunch once a week with his mother at the same fish'n'chip place is a never-ending chore, but it is only one day a week. The other six days are my responsibility. And, I have told him I need help. Some of the matriarch's expectations have to give way to compromises; am I being unfair asking an elderly woman to expect less? Her care is fine but I would like to be able to get out more; I would like to be able to go to a bookstore and not have to leave her sitting in the car while I nip in for a few minutes. I should be able to go out to a store and not have to take her with me. I should be able to take the children to the movies and it not be a secret from grandma. The compromises are not unreasonable. A simple conversation should enable them; but, I think my husband is afraid of his mother.

Do we become so set in our ways as we age that we are incapable of compromise? Do I want to admit the matriarch is something of an oligarch is this house? I don't know how who we are, our actual identity, becomes entrenched in the person we become but I wonder about a seniority being, literally, a life of having needs fulfilled and doing nothing for others. It's a weird kind of selfishness, I think. It is as though one expects their old age to be payback for the unselfishness of youth; does that make sense? And, I think there are some natures incapable of debating this issue, of saying to a parent, "You are asking too much of my wife, my children." But, then, what do you do? Put a parent in a home knowing it will lead to a life without the simple strawberry snacks and probably death?

But, back to the sugar; my husband took the advice, put icing sugar on his mother's defrosted strawberries, made a kind of thin syrup and the woman ate it. She ate it to my husband's chagrin. In the kitchen, he made faces because the very thought of how sweet such a snack would be was unbearable to him.