Amazing woman...

I know I've written about her before but I'm doing it again...so indulge me. Thanks.

My mother is an amazing woman. She is 95 years old and in a nursing home. She eats soft food, a recent development. She cannot walk. Requires total hands on care from others. She can speak but often her words elude her. Yet, she is an amazing woman.

Although she has been the high moral gage of our family, I have also seen her show enormous physical strength throughout my life. She is Depression Era strong and those of us who are blessed with parents who survived the Great Depression knows exactly what that mean. It means that she was able to feed and clothe six kids and put them through Catholic school by working nearly every day of her life. We never suffered hunger or poverty, though we were poor. She made things she wanted to have and cherished those she had to save to buy. We had an entire room in our house that we were never allowed to go into for the longest time. It was the one with the "good" furniture and that was only for "company". If she wanted to redecorate, she did it herself and that meant all of it, the carpeting, the repainting, the new wallpaper. There was no spare money to pay someone to do those things. And honestly she would have thought it silly to pay someone to do something she was fully capable of doing. I'm writing this blog right now on an old desk she hand painted and had in her bedroom for years. She took out a wall with a sledge hammer when she was 75 years old because she wanted to make two small bedrooms into a master suite. When the basement suddenly flooded, which is did a lot when we first moved into my parent's first "new" house, she would gather all towels and blankets and stop the flood and then stay up into the wee hours of morning cleaning it all up and washing everything. She taught us to be strong women and worried about us as if we would always be her "little girls".

Last Thursday, I got a call from my sister. My mom choked on her lunch and they did the Heimlich maneuver no less than 7 times. She's 95 and weighs about 90 pounds. She turned blue but never lost consciousness. They took her by ambulance to the hospital to get her checked out. Surely, at her age and in her condition all that crunching had to have broken a rib or two.

Nope.
Not a one.

My mom is an amazing woman. Even the ER doc was amazed that she came through that ordeal with nothing. And, in her semi-confused state, nothing means not even a clear memory of what exactly happened. So they've adjusted her diet  to soft foods and she's no worse for wear. I hope I have her genes. She is the strongest woman I know.