More Odd Changes

Clothing. That was another thing.

For most of my adult life, my mother wasn't the type of woman anyone would ever call a "clothes horse".  She wore what she had, and seldom purchased anything new. I'd say that much of her wardrobe was from the late 70s - pull on stretch pants with elastic waists - designed for comfort and easy washing, but definitely not for the fashionable. A few favourite t-shirts and lose fitting blouses, and the ever present "sweat suits". In cold weather she'd live in those. She had two or three dresses - basic black (for funerals), an early 80's fitted dress with peplum in dark teal (for weddings and parties), and a cotton "house dress".  Most of her shoes were flats - loafer style or running shoes, and most were pretty well worn. What new clothing she got were usually pieces we picked her up for Christmas, or Mother's Day or her birthday.

After dad died, she'd taken to wearing his red flannel nightshirt which was enormous on her. Dad wasn't tall, but he was portly, and a woman of 80 pounds wearing a red flannel nightshirt in a men's extra large was a sight to behold. She'd scurry down the hall to the bathroom with the sleeves flapping and tails of the red nightshirt flying around her skinny legs. I used to laugh when she'd do that - for some reason it reminded me of Ebeneezer Scrooge in his own nighshirt and cap. (Even stranger still is the fact that I now have that nightshirt, and wear it in the winter months, though it is now tattered and faded. It reminds me of dad, I guess...and of mom. It's one of the very few things I kept.)

When she was a young woman, she was fashionable, but from the time I was a teenager I don't recall my mom ever caring too much about her clothing. She had a dress custom made when I got married, and then when my sister got married. Those were only worn for those two occasions, and never again.

We tried to get her to shop for new clothes with us when we first moved her, but she would have none of it. She kept asking us if we thought she was made of money. I remember laughing, and telling her at that point that dad had left her very well cared for - more money than any of us had known they had. And then, when the condo was sold, there'd be even more. She got mad at that point, and pulled out her "bank book" to show me that it only contained $42.15 - not even enough to pay the bills.

I sighed. We'd thrown that old bank book away multiple times now.

We noticed other apparent changes in mom too - her food choices, for instance. She began eating things she'd never ate before. Not that she'd never tried it before, but that she simply didn't like it. Now, she'd eat all manner of things, and insist that she'd always eaten them. Pasta/spaghetti was something my mother always cooked, even made her own from scratch (including homemade sauce), but it wasn't something she'd eat herself. She made it for my dad, and for us kids, but she'd sit down to the table with a tomato sandwich instead of pasta. Now, she ate spaghetti with gusto, telling anyone who'd listen that it had "always" been her favourite dish.

In the beginning, we'd try to correct her. Soon, however, we realized that not only was reminding her that she didn't like it a lost cause, it probably wasn't good for her diet. If she did eventually remember (because of our nagging, not because she could remember), she might not eat all of the "new" foods any longer.  And because she was eating a more varied and balanced diet, we decided to just let her eat what she would eat, because it was healthier than her not eating at all.