My mother, 84, was a widow. She lived alone and was proud of it. She hated the idea of ‘retirement villages’ or, God forbid, ‘a nursing’ home.
“They’re old people storage facilities,” she’d say with a sniff. I live half a world away. There wasn’t much I could do to change her mind.
A few years later, on the way to buy a cake for friends who were coming to tea, she fell and dislocated her shoulder. Her rehabilitation took longer than expected. She struggled to ‘walk her fingers up the wall’ as the physiotherapist ordered and, grudgingly, accepted the idea of ‘assisted living’.
“I have my own bedsitting room and the sun comes in all day. There are chandeliers in the dining room,” she told me. She sounded genuinely pleased. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I rang a few weeks later to see how she was.
“I’m okay,” she said. Her room was fine. The food was fine. The people were fine.
“New friends?” I asked.
There was a silence. ‘Not really,’ she said softly.
Apparently most seats in the dining room, where peak chatting and friend making took place, were reserved in advance. Respectable, kindly looking, elderly women sat at the best tables, their handbags placed strategically on seats to save them for friends.
Newcomers, the shy and the terminally grumpy were relegated to tables around the edges.
It sounded like a scene from ‘Mean Girls’, the movie! Was my mum’s retirement home full of superannuated Queen Bees and Wannabes, the kind of girls who ruled (and ruined) my life in senior school?
I remembered my eldest child after her first day at school. Did she have fun? Did she make friends?
“I asked one girl if I can play and she said no,” she sobbed.
My heart broke. How could some little brat (albeit with amazingly good plaits) do that to my child?
Now, 30 years later, some elderly brats with walking frames and dentures wouldn’t let my mother play! ‘Say it isn’t so!’ I screamed inwardly. Surely age brings more than arthritis and walking frames? It’s supposed to bring kindness and wisdom, too, isn’t it?
When I was 14 mum told me most mean girls grow up and get nice eventually. “But it’s not always worth the wait. I suggest you find new friends.”
The difficulty is that wanting to be part of a group is in our genes. Whether we’re eight or 88 we’re social animals. Our clothes, partners, cars and even our baby strollers send out little signals.
“Please like me and let me into your group. I’m one of you!”
Pat McDermott
The direct approach finally worked for mum. After a month or two she found a friend and then another and not long before she died I met her ‘group.’
“This is Edith. She has trouble swallowing. Sometimes she chokes. This is Gladys. Her daughter, Elspeth, is having big marriage problems. Geoffrey (the only bloke at the table) plays golf. But it’s winter and the golf course is covered with snow so he can’t play at all, can you Geoffrey?”
Geoffrey agreed. Golf was difficult in winter.
I wondered at my mother’s bluntness until I remembered something else she told me years ago. “You’re the same when you’re old as you are when you’re young. Only more so!”
Now that’s something to worry about.
