My Mother Is 95, Takes Care Of Her Own Affairs, and Is Obsessed With Her Bowel Movements

Grant Me the Serenity to Accept the Things I Cannot Change

My mother is vivacious and delightful with everyone but us, her daughters. With us, she is impossible. There is no conversation, only conflict. If you’re thinking dementia, let that go. She’s just relentless, and always has been. She’s as maddening as a leaky faucet. Argue, argue, argue. Drip, drip, drip. She never stops.

I’m 65 and a psychiatrist. But what do I know about the body? Mom may be 95 but infirmities are for sissies. Chronic constipation, chronic insomnia, chronic back pain. She refuses to acknowledge that these are the worsening discomforts of an aging body. How does she explain them? Her doctor is prescribing the wrong medicine. Obviously.

She takes her long and exceptionally healthy life as her due, and she expects it to continue. Never mind that the majority of her peers are either dead or battling dementia, strokes, and the like.

As far as she’s concerned the immutable laws of Nature have not, do not and will not apply to her.

My mother is fixated on having a solid bowel movement every day, first thing in the morning. If she doesn’t, watch out! Diarrhea of the mouth.

“Fifteen flippin’ minutes of potty talk,” my younger sister Anna groused in one of our increasingly frequent phone calls. “Lord, give me patience.”

Then Mom didn’t go for seven days. We begged her to call her doctor but she refused. Admit she had a problem? Never. It got so bad she ended up going by ambulance to the ER to address the problem with a procedure that you probably don’t want to know about.

“Did you know she looks in the bowl every time she goes?” Anna asked me during our next phone call. “I wonder what she’s looking for.”

“Let’s not go there.”

“What she needs is one of those German toilets with a landing platform.”

“Turds on a shelf!”

“Let’s buy her one for her next birthday!”

“Can we just put her on a plane to Germany instead?” I asked. We both cracked up.

“I can’t think like that!” Anna said. “Yes, she’s a mammoth pain in the ass. But I’m working on being a better person. I’m trying to manifest positive energy.”

We both burst out laughing again.

“Look at us,” I said as we wound down. “You’re a lawyer. I’m a doctor. Mom is intelligent. She speaks five languages! But all she talks about is what comes out of her butt. And now that’s all we talk about.”

We’re good daughters. We’re devoted to our mother whether or not she appreciates our help. We just wish she were a little more grateful that all she has to worry about at 95 is moving her bowels.

“Well,” Anna sighed. “When she’s got to go, she’ll go.”

“Wait. What? Poop? Or die?”

“Well….”

“Let’s face it. At this point, either one would work for us,” I said. Of course we started laughing again.

“Is it wrong for us to laugh like this?”

“If we don’t laugh, we’ll cry.”

Sure, our mother may be impossible. But you know what? I am grateful for my sister. We’re there for each other and that’s a gift.

Daniela Gitlin is a rural psychiatrist and author of Practice, Practice, Practice: This Psychiatrist’s Life, which is mostly a memoir of her work as a therapist, but of course it includes her mother.