I lost track of things and forgot that today was Valentine’s Day!

This morning, I had a 8am telephone appointment with my mother’s doctor. Normally, I would be outside, giving the cats their food and warm water. We were still under an ongoing extreme cold warning (which is now finally over), so I would have basically just taken care of the cats and skipped most of my morning rounds!

With the phone appointment, however, I messaged my daughters, asking if they could take care of the outside cats. I was pretty sure my older daughter had gone to bed after a night’s work, but I wasn’t sure if my younger daughter was available.

She was, and she took care of the outside cats for me, while I waited for the call.

Which was about half an hour late, of course. My daughter was back inside, updating me, when the phone rang. With the cats’ food trays and bowls so full of frozen kibble, we’re figuring out ways to make it so they can actually eat it. With the isolation shelter open again, I’m thinking of taking some of kibble from the kibble shelter and putting it in the isolation shelter. When there was just two cats, there was excess kibble, but once the other cats started going in there again, the bowl was empty, and even the kibble scattered about was eaten up!

As for the phone call, it wasn’t my mother’s doctor that called, but another doctor working with her. I explained about my mother having been in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and how we were told she needs to see a doctor every month to monitor her kidney function, now that she’s back on the water pills. They didn’t actually have everything in my mother’s file yet, and the doctor had to ask me when she had been discharged!

They did have the results of her last bloodwork done while she was in the hospital, though, and he could tell me her kidneys are doing just fine.

The problem, of course, is making a 93 yr old who struggles to walk, climb into the truck and drive to the clinic, over and over, because there are no local doctors available.

The hospital in her town does have a lab, though.

My mother won’t need to physically go to the clinic every month.

They will mail bloodwork requisition forms to my mother every month. The local hospital will not accept these forms being faxed to them. It would have been better if I could physically pick it up, to eliminate any risk of the form being lost in the mail, but that’s just not an option.

I will, however, be in that town next week, and will be stopping at the clinic to get my own medical files to take to my new doctor, before my daughter and I have our appointments. So he got a form printed out and it will be waiting for me when I get there. As my mother had bloodwork done this month, already, she won’t need to get it done again until next month.

Aside from that, she can have telephone appointments to go over the results, though they do that only if there is a problem. She won’t need to physically come in for an appointment unless there is a need. We will have to continue to monitor her for swelling and breathing issues, which the doctor at the hospital already explained to us, and my mother is to go to the ER right away, if problems start up again.

That done, I updated my siblings in our group chat, as much to make sure I wrote down the details while it was still fresh in my mind as to share it with family. Then I phoned my mother to update her.

As I started talking to her about the monthly appointments the hospital doctor said she needed, and that I called the clinic about them, my mother got somewhat agitated. It took a bit to figure it out, but she was under the impression she had a physical appointment with her doctor. I had told her I had made a phone appointment to talk about her case, but since then, she got it in her mind that this was an appointment with her, not about her. I clarified and told her, I’d made a phone appointment with me, that I had just gotten off the phone, and I was calling to let her know how it went.

She stayed very quiet as I went through the call which, in itself, is unusual. Normally, she interrupts and starts taking the conversation in other directions. I’m not completely sure how much she understood, but when I got to the part about going to the local hospital for monthly blood work, she said that we would have to keep track of that for her.

Which, of course, was already the plan!

She then started talking about her medications and the lock box. To make is short, my mother was very angry about having the lock box, the home care aids cant get into it, she doesn’t need this big box and can manage her own medications.

I was alarmed when she said the home care aids can’t get into it. She said she didn’t get her medications this morning. At first, she made it sound like it was because the aide couldn’t open it, but if that were true, I would have gotten a phone call. Or my brother would have. This happened only once, with one person, though. My mother had 2 other visits the day before, after the new lock box was brought over, and got her medications. Now she was saying the aids can’t get into the box at all?

I asked if she got her morning medications, and she said no.

No one showed up.

????

Again, if they were short staffed, I would have got a phone call, because I would have had to drive to my mother’s to give her her medications.

Then I noticed the time.

It wasn’t even 9am yet.

They are supposed to give her her medications before 7 an 9am.

I mentioned the time and said, they probably just haven’t made it yet.

Well, my mother was still quite angry. She can manage her own medications. They don’t always come at the same time. She doesn’t need this big box.

We talked for awhile and I reminded her, this was doctor’s orders. It was for her own safety.

Oh, so my children don’t trust me?

I brought up that she herself has noticed she is not remembering things. Then I brought up the pill boxes full of loose pills I’d found when I got her old bubble packs to take the the pharmacy, and that the pharmacist had to dispose of them. She has a history of messing with her medications, and things like that were why she needed a lock box and med assist from home care. This is for her safety.

I didn’t bring it up with my mother, but in the group chat with my siblings later, I mentioned that all these pills she had in there were pills she did not take when she should have. Plus, she ignored the days and times on the bubble packs, just staring from the top, and taking them whenever she had her breakfast, because she is supposed to take them with food (except I don’t think any of them actually specify to take with food). And by “with food”, she means with a couple of crackers or cookies or a piece of toast and, before we got the home care med assist, she would take them at 5am and 5pm and before bed, instead of the times on the bubble pack. As a result, she often had a couple of active bubble packs going at once, and really made things harder for the home care aids.

But all of that would have been too much to talk to her about. We basically just have to bring it down to “doctor’s orders” and “it’s for your safety.”

Our call got interrupted, though, by a knock at the door.

The home care aid had arrived to give her her morning medications.

My mother has no understanding of how much she is messing herself up.

After I got off the phone with my mother, I updated my siblings again. My mother’s behavior is a strong demonstration of just why having that lock box, and home care visits for her med assist, is so important. We were able to chat for a bit, wondering about how my mother will handle having a Life Line, once that gets set up.

It can be really hard to help my mother when she keeps trying to sabotage our efforts. These group chats and updates are extra important, because my mother will say one thing to me, then something different to each of my siblings, then tries to play us against each other. This is something she has done for pretty much as long as I can remember though, of course, as a child, I had no understanding of what she was doing.

Aside from the group chat, I got a Valentine’s Day message from my SIL, which is when I was reminded that that’s what today it.

Which got me to thinking about the whole theme of Valentine’s Day being about love, and about what it means to love someone. Years ago, I read a point someone very wise said.

Love is a verb.

Most of us think of love as a feeling. Something you “fall into”. An emotion.

Which all can be part of love but, in the end, love is not how we feel, but what we do.

The English language rather fails when it comes to the word love. There are too many definitions for one word. The Ancient Greeks had different words for love that I think we could not go wrong, bringing back. They also viewed their words for love on a sort of scale. There are nine modern and ancient words for love. Here are four ancient ones.

The first type of love – the basest form – is eros. Eros is physical love, and the root of our word, erotica. Eros is about sex, really. In English, it would probably be better translated as “lust”. Eros was considered the lowest form of love.

The next type of love is philia. This is platonic love. Yes, there is a physical aspect to it – hugs and kisses between friends that have zero sexual connotations – but philia is brotherly love. The love of deep friendship. Philia is used in many ways in our language. Philadelphia is known as the “city of brotherly love” based on the Greek definition. It is also found in the suffix -phile. One example being bibliophile, a lover of books.

The next type of love, higher on the scale, is storgê. This is what might be called, family love. It is particularly used to described married couples raising their children together.

The highest form of love, however is ágape. This is unconditional love. Sacrificial love. Agape is independent of any external factors. It is given wholly, and expects nothing in return. Agape is the foundation of Christianity; that Jesus set aside His godhood to live fully human; a sinless life we could not hope to achieve, take on the punishment for our sins we all deserve – all of us, throughout humanity, throughout time. An execution so horrific, a new word was invented to describe the pain. Excruciating. Ex crucio. From the cross. To die in our place, so that He could conquer death, that we may live. All we have to do is fully accept this gift of His, yet we have no obligation to do so. That is the height of agape love.

So what is love, in our daily lives?

Love is what we do.

Love is to be friends with someone, be apart for years, yet when reunited, it’s as if those years apart never happened.

Love is seeing each other at our best and at our worst, and still being there for each other.

Love is a couple growing old together, facing the world together, long after the tingles have faded.

Love is a parent denying a child something they want, in favour of something they need, even when the child has a blowout and says they hate us for it.

In one of my recent devotions, these verses from Luke 11 were included.

5Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity ^e he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.

While the devotion was about persistence in prayer, as both a parent and someone with a lifelong interest in how people lived in the past, this line stands out to me.

‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 

In context for the time period, most likely the family was sleeping together on a mat woven of reeds or grasses. Even overnight visitors would join the pile. Can you just picture it? Husband and wife, lying on the floor, their kids snuggled up around or even on them. Dad there with a toddler on his chest and another child on each side, while Mom lies next to them with a babe at her breast… and then there’s a knock at the door! No wonder the response is “don’t bother me… I can’t get up…” !!

For most of human history, that’s how we slept. That’s how we lived. We had almost constant physical contact with each other. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that houses started to have rooms set aside just for sleeping, and that children got separate rooms to sleep in. Even now, in many places around the world, separate bedrooms (and sometimes just having beds) are a luxury, and the idea of children sleeping apart from their parents would be unheard of.

Sadly, we live in a world hungry for love. Real love.

We even hunger for the platonic physical aspects of love that used to be just part of our everything living, before cradles and cribs and separate beds and bedrooms became the norm, among other changes. Our culture has become so hungry for philia and storge, many turn to eros to fill the emptiness. We have reached a point when many cannot view any sort of physical affection as being anything but eros. A parent can’t even kiss their own child on the lips, or a mother breastfeed her baby, without people viewing it as something sexual in nature.

Our current culture, at least in our Western nations, has redefined love in other ways. To far too many, love means to always go along with what a person wants. To validate and enable anything they do, even if they are self harming in the process. It means to agree with anything they say, no matter how wrong they are. If you do not do this, you get accused of hate – another word that has been redefined dramatically!

Which brings me back to today.

Today, my mother was very angry about her medications being in a lock box. When told the reason why, she tried to turn it around and accuse us of not trusting her.

For some people, the “loving” thing would be to do what she wants. To make her “happy” by giving in. Take away the lock box, and let her take her meds whenever she thinks she should, or only the ones she thinks she should, even though she can’t remember what all of them are anymore, and certainly doesn’t know what the new ones are.

That would, of course, be wrong and even harmful. So the loving thing to do is NOT what she wants, but what is good for her, even if she can’t understand it and has hairy fits about it.

When it comes to my mother, I don’t “feel” love for her. I don’t know if I ever have. Years of confusing and abusive behaviour made that impossible. But she is my mother, and I still “do” love for her. She can get mad at me and yell at me and say cruel things to me, but I will still “do” love. Or she can flip like a switch and suddenly become oddly generous or kind, and I don’t know if it’s real, or if she’s trying to mess with me. It doesn’t matter. I will still “do” love. That doesn’t mean I’ll put up with the behavior, and I will call her out on it – which is also a way to “do” love.

I can make similar parallels to our home life, where my husband has to sleep in a hospital bed in another room. We may not be able to share a bed, but we can still “do” love.

Or where our daughters gave up so much to move out with us, turned the poorly insulated upstairs into their own apartment, and put up with freezing winters and boiling summers up there.

Or my younger daughter crawling out of a warm bed this morning, to go outside in freezing temperatures, to feed and water the cats while I wait for a phone call.

There are so many ways to “do” love.

This Valentine’s Day, I wish you much philia. I wish you storge and agape and even, if appropriate, a little bit of eros!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The Re-Farmer