day twenty-six

cross your proverbial fingers. the meeting that i had today, the one that required the recent fury of portfolio activity, i feel as though the meeting went well. with any luck there will be a short respite between gigs. lord knows my finances would appreciate that greatly.

have i told you lately that my mother, the woman who gave me life, makes me infinitely crazy at times? i think i mentioned before that my mother's hearing has become compromised in her advanced years. or more succinctly she is as deaf as a stump in her right ear. she was told that she needs a hearing aid in that ear and she bought one several years ago. i am sure i've shared this story. she stopped wearing it because she said that it didn't fit properly and it would often slip out of her ear. rather than see someone to get the fitting issue corrected she opted to store the hearing aid in a box in her drawer. she chose that option because she was afraid of losing the aid and it had been a very expensive purchase.

flash forward to the latter part of 2012. my mother gets another hearing test and she is told in no uncertain terms she needs to wear an aid. there is another fitting and this time she is told there is something unusual about her ear canal and the units that fit within the canal are never going to work for her. she buys  unit that hooks over the top of her ear with a very thin clear plastic hook, the rest of the unit slips unobtrusively into the ear canal. for a hot minute my mother wore the device and suddenly the television volume no longer needed to be set to decibel level akin to a fighter plane during a fly-by.

little by little i've noticed that i have been repeating myself again. and that i can follow along with the program shown on the television in the living room, from the other side of the house. yep, you guessed it, mom has decided to stop wearing her aid again. the first time i called her on it, she explained to me that she didn't need it because she was in the house and she wasn't going anywhere. this of course was after i had to repeat myself several times.

rather than succumb to the urge to turn her over my knee, i have come up with another option. if we are talking and she can't hear me i will happily to repeat myself if her aid in. however if she isn't wearing it i have not intention of repeating myself. i figure if she wants to hear me, she needs to wear the unit, if she chooses not to wear it then clearly she doesn't want to hear me.

we have had a couple stand-offs since then. i've said something and she has asked me to repeat myself. i gave her a hard look and then she giggled like a school girl and admitted to not wearing her aid. she asked me to repeat myself again and i just shook my head and walked away.

*sigh

oh and 150 words