Moving Mary
from the bed to the toilet
was like moving an angora sweatered mountain.
At close to four hundred pounds,
she was slow as a creeping ice floe,
and each step
(she hated the jouncing of the power lift and wouldn't let me use it)
was a drawn out adagio of aches, pains, and complaints.
By the time I got her from Point A to Point B,
we were both exhausted and trembling with fatigue.
But, the back and forth was the easy part.
The hard part,
the part that always seemed to eviscerate my patience
and transmute me from a smiling caregiver
to a clenched up ball of iridium black rage,
was the infernal standing around and waiting
as Mary methodically rearranged every item within her reach,
then painstakingly instructed me as to how to arrange the rest.
"Move my marzipan fruit a little closer."
"The remote goes on the left."
"Can you scoot my pillow some?"
Jesus wept,
and now you know why.
Just as the thrum
of the boiling blood in my temples approached unbearable,
we would finish,
and with pats and smiles and mawkish tears of gratitude that didn't quite ring true,
she would thank me and finally let me go
(nerves shot,
hair a mess of frizz and sweat,
vertebrae in my back compressed
to bits of gneiss)
take the break that I had been scheduled to start twenty minutes before . . .
as Mary damned well knew.
Control is a funny thing, isn't it?
Shawna's Monday Melting words
strung together for Open Link Night at dVerse.
