7 years an oyomesan at oshogatsu...

SEVEN Japanese New Years with Okaasan!!
SEVEN!

I just went back over this blog and looked. Cos I am a sad person with nothing better to do on December 31st at 8.30 pm.


Actually, I am knackered. Today I went with friends and covered about 7 km on cross country skis in a park near Sapporo. It was beautiful, hard work and fun.

And then I came home - scraped the burned pan that Okaasan had left from lunchtime heating up, had a long bath and opened the wine..

And cooked New Year dinner for Okaasan.

Again.

In 2008: Okaasan cooked New Year food in my tiny kitchen, and I assisted her. It was hard work because she kept forgetting what she's just done with seasoning and timeing.

In 2009: I bought stuff from the supermarket and heated it up.

In 2010: I took Okaasan shopping for all the ingredients and it took over five hours to help her cook all the stuff. A stressy experience for both of us.

In 2011: I bought ready made, I asked her about the taste just before serving.

In 2012: I had a Japanese cooking lesson in autumn and did an amazing spread! Okaasan was impressed.

In 2013: Instant noodles and shop stuff.

This year?

Instant noodles dressed up to make it interesting.

After I'd finished loading stuff in the bowls - and hiding the instant packaging...it looked like this:

And tomorrow we'll eat the things Okaasan bought the other day and some readymade I bought.

So, Okaasan and me sat at the dinner table to end another year of being forced to live together...

Not so much chat about New Years past this time. A little about cooking, then just chat about the cat and how pink his nose is.

As I was clearing the dishes Okaasan looked around the kitchen.

"What day is today then?"

"December 31st, that's why we just ate toshikoshi (longlife) noodles..."

"Oh? December 31st today? I forget many things now, it's strange..."

"Yes, we know. It's ok. You are still healthy in your body, and enjoy eating and drinking and laughing. Don't worry...."

And so we finished dinner and another year. I checked the heating in her room. Made sure the TV was switched to the channel with old fashioned singers on it...and left her to doze into 2015...

Thankyou all for reading this blog this year. I've been a bit patchy on the blogging. 

Time for wine and chocolate, and something on cable TV that has nothing to do with Japanese end of year!!

See you on the other side :-)

Winter Week 1

Hey!
Truckin' into the first full week of Winter Care on Okaasan and Me.

All going well.
The snow arrived - not a lot at the moment, maybe 5 cm, so the roads are icy and dangerous.
NOT the conditions for Okaasan to go walking. Luckily though, she understands that and doesn't seem to be keen to go out at all. I come home and she has switched on the porch light, closed her room curtains and has settled in for the evening.

A year or two ago I'd often come home about 5 pm and Okaasan would then start stirring to go out - of course it was far too dark/cold/icy - but this year she is less interested, maybe less confident, about going out for walks alone. So she'll be down to the twice a week outings: with day care helper on Wednesdays and me on the weekends.
( And no, I haven't forgotten about the Nishi-guru exercise DVD looping idea - just haven't had the time to set it up...)

It's good that Okaasan isn't wanting to go out alone. Before Dear Son left for ski work last week he and I talked about whether I should be hiding Okaasan's shoes to prevent her from trying to leave the house...but it seems there is no need because she is staying put in front of the TV.

This week?

I had Japanese test on Sunday afternoon. With hundreds of eager young Chinese students. Waaay above my level. Level 3. I knew it, and from the very first page of questions it was clear. So I just relaxed and enjoyed ticking random circles on the answer sheet...picking my way thru the stuff I could do as a language practice.
Listening section no problem. Reading and grammar - whooooaaaa!!!
It's ok. I haven't studied hard at all this autumn. So now I know what Level 3 demands. Maybe I'll try next year.

If there was a test in practical language ability I'd ace it. In the past few weeks I've done the following in Japanese:

* entertained and managed the life of an elderly lady.
* interviewed and arranged classes for a prospective student
* negotiated and booked a movie theater for a documentary screening next year (more on THAT later)
* given the Japanese language test room staff a blasting for being noisy during the first part of the test...

Yes. The test staff. They were tramping up and down the classroom during the first 15 mins of the grammar section - shuffling papers, clattering pens on the table and generally failing to Keep Quiet in the Test Room. So, in the break time - I complained to them. In perfectly ungrammatical, but getting-the-message-across Japanese!!
Cos I am bossy. Sadly, got that trait from my mother...

Anyway.
Okaasan and me.
Doing fine.
She had lunch box deliveries. Dinner with me on Sunday and Monday night. A bath on Sunday.
Dinner chat about Kyoto and wartime food. If students give me some Japanese snacks as souvenirs from a trip, I leave them on the kitchen table because then I can use them as a prop to get Okaasan talking about the place they come from.

Yesterday I had my first year end party with students. A friend came in to feed the cats in the evening. She could access the cats upstairs without disturbing Okaasan downstairs.

I left curry in a pan on the cooker. With a box of pre-cooked rice. As I was leaving the house at 10 am I wasn't sure that the food would keep hot in the food flasks until 6 or 7 pm.
So, somehow Okaasan would have to heat it up herself. Her ability on heating up food is hit and miss: sometimes ok, sometimes half heated, sometimes the food is forgotten in the microwave within a minute or two of her putting it there.

At 6 pm I found a quiet spot near the shoe lockers of the party restaurant to call Okaasan and tell her that I was out - so sorry etc - your dinner - DS's famous home made curry and rice - is on the cooker. Sorry. See you later.

At 7 pm I escaped the party again and by the shoe boxes checked in with Okaasan...
Dinner? No, I didn't eat dinner. I was watching Tv....oh...wait a moment...what's this...oh...curry...yes, I ate curry...here it is...

I got home just after 10 pm and could smell the burned saucepans from the entrance hall. Two burned pans. She'd cooked rice with water in one pan. And next to her sleeping form I spotted the other pan: burned curry and a bowl of half eaten curry.

Oh well. She ate something. For one night it is ok. Six years ago, when DS rescued Okaasan from her chaotic home in the Tokyo suburbs, he found many burned pans in her kitchen. She really can't do cooking or reheating. She knows there is a microwave and sometimes uses it...or pans, and burns the food. That's why we bought a cooker that cuts out when the heat gets too hot, or if the pan is not moved for an hour.

Sigh. Oh well. 
Time to start pan scrubbing.

But today! Day care day!!! Yippeee!!!
Now I only have to worry about leaving my kitchen in clean enough state that the helper lady isn't shocked about my housekeeping level.

Naaah

Did I ask Okaasan how to cook burdock and carrots?
Naaaahhhhh.
I came home on Monday at 6 pm after 4 hours of classroom time and NINETY minutes of the dentist chair (ongoing and almost finished root canal treatment) and poured myself a large glass of Chardonnay. Flopped on the sofa with a cat draped over my knees.
Dragged myself upright enough to put the burdock and carrot in a miso soup creation, and heat up supermarket fried fish for dinner. Gave Okaasan 30 minutes of chat time at dinner.
And retreated back to a 2nd large glass of wine and more TV.

Didn't have the warm, relationship building joint cooking thing at all.
I have a dream, that if I wasn't working full time I would be spending lots of quality time with Okaasan chatting to and doing things with her to build our connections and give her fun in life.
But - too many days are like this Monday. Work comes first, and Okaasan care is limited to getting some kind of food on the table by 7 pm every day.
In between work we fit in the bathtimes/the walk times/the laundry/the cleaning/the lunches left on the table or ordered in for her.
Two people working don't have much extra time to give to quality caring.

We do what we can fit in, without feeling too guilty.

Meanwhile - DS is back from Tokyo and getting ready for his ski season.
I've turned up the nagging level so that he has been forced to call the day care manager and arrange a home visit for next week to discuss what they can do to help Okaasan this winter.
We are hoping for a friendly woman to come every Wednesday afternoon and take Okaasan out to a local big supermarket, let her walk and shop for snacks and magazines, bring her home and maybe cook some dinner for her. If that happens mid week thru December to March, then I can take her out at weekends.
If she gets out of the house and walks at least twice a week - it is a good enough basis for life.
Plus - if I can get that Nishi Guru exercise video set up....

Have to give up on going to day care for now. She is too negative about it. And DS isn't eager enough to push her.

We did a big clean of her room today. Got the carpet back from the dry cleaners and threw away a lot of papers and stuff in her room. 
Found more #$*?<" in a supermarket flyer...left on the heater in the kitchen :-( I'd noticed the paper there for a few days...hadn't realised what was inside the fold....

yuk.

We really HAVE to check and clean her room and areas more now.....

Dear Son has realised that his mum's walking isn't steady at all. He doesn't want her going on her own to much. In fact she hasn't been out on her own for a walk for a week or two, and she has been downtown on the subway for maybe a month or more.
With winter coming her life is about to get much smaller...

and my life is about to get....BUSY!
This blog, which has been comatose during summer will probably liven up.
Probably.

"I can do it!"......or not...

Carer's ego trip.
I sometimes wonder: "If I stopped doing all the things I do for Okaasan. What would happen? How much could she do herself? All the planning, shopping, cooking, serving, washing up, laundry, cleaning, money managing, arranging of life's necessities....if I just stopped. What would happen?"

I get a glimpse of the answer when I am away from home for a few days and Dear Son does most of the above. But not the cleaning or the laundry. It's a male thing, isn't it? I come home to a carpet strewn with newspapers and supermarket flyers, old bits of food and lunch boxes nestling down under it all, random underpants and socks. Unwashed tea cups with dried tea stains.

And that's just our 2nd floor living room. :-)

But, seriously. I do wonder. How much could Okaasan cope? She wouldn't starve. She could buy or find food and eat it. Maybe cold. She can go to the toilet herself. The trash would mount up around her ears. But she would get by. I guess.
When Dear Son found her 5 years ago in her house near Tokyo she was "getting by" in a trash filled home with money and rotting food, paper and clothes around her. Eating at a local restaurant every day and fighting with the post office about money she believed it had stolen from her.
Which is why he brought her to live with us. So the trash wouldn't mount up, the food would be served and the money guarded.

Last night turned into a little experiment. In "cooking"...well in heating up pre-cooked dinner, serving and eating it.

Okaasan came home from a successful day care trip. Had enjoyed a bath, lunch, chat and a movie with popcorn!
At 5 pm I was starting to prepare her dinner to put into flasks before I headed out for evening work.
I usually do this once she has settled down by the TV, it avoids all the confusing conversation (and my guilt) about yes-I-am-going-out-you-have-to-eat-alone. I prep it all, put it on the table and then cheerfully tell her just as I am leaving.

This time she found me starting the prepping.
"Oh, you don't need to do that! You are busy, I can wait till later! I can do it myself!"
"You can? Usually you don't. So Dear Son and I prepare for you. Recently you don't cook, we help you, don't we? Can you do it tonight? Wonderful....okay....thankyou..."

So I left her to it.
I left pre-cooked  rice and a tofu dish in plastic boxes for reheating. I  left spinach and soy sauce. I left the instant soup packets. All on the kitchen counter.

Very interested to see what would happen.

A snow storm, work and delicious local curry restaurant dinner alone...came home about 9.15 pm.

All the food boxes and food was on the kitchen counter exactly as I'd left them at 5 pm.
Okaasan was in her room watching TV.

Oh well. Guess she wasn't hungry  after day center popcorn. She slept and watched TV instead.

I put the food in the fridge and went upstairs. TV, wine, cats, e mails....get ready for bed.

9.45 pm a little voice comes echoing up the stairs:"Amanda-san! Amanda-san!".
"Are you home? I didn't eat anything! I'm hungry! Is there any dinner?"

So back to the kitchen and got the food out again. Heated it up. Okaasan standing there hugging herself and looking a bit manic. She didn't remember anything about the 5 pm "I'll do it myself" conversation of course. 

Had just watched TV and slept and watched TV through the evening until the hunger drove her into the kitchen/or she vaguely heard me coming home....waited to be fed...but nothing came...so emerged into the kitchen and then, seeing no food on the table or counter...didn't look in the fridge...went to the bottom of the stairs to call for help.

So. If we weren't making and serving food at set times of the day, she would be hunting for food at random times when hungry. Would that be bad? I guess in the long run - yes. The routine of the days, the mealtimes would all get blended into a stream of TV/sleep/eat/TV/sleep/eat.

It is probably better that she is kept on a routine of lunch at 12, dinner at 7. Now it is daytime. Now it is nighttime. 
So. I have a value :-)
As I said, carer's ego trip.

Home alone with sitters

Ok. About to go off for three days of fun in the snow, hotels, onsens....and oh my god - a SPEECH IN JAPANESE!

I just went in and told Okaasan that she is in charge of the house for 3 days.
Gave her the letter Dear Son wrote: it is the schedule every day for food deliveries and who is coming into the house to feed Okaasan or cats.
She was a bit surprised, of course, lots of looking back and forth at the letter paper and the calender..."what day is it now? when is this? What day is it now?" etc

But ok. I think. I left another of the letters on the kitchen table.
She said that lunchbox delivery is not necessary because "I can put rice and egg in a pan and cook it up for myself"...and I told her that the lunches were ordered for now, so talk to DS about that on Saturday....don't want to get into THAT topic for now...I have the burned pans in the garden shed trash box...

Gave her money for incidental shopping.

Ahhh. Hope she is ok.
Hope the cats are ok. After a few hours of nervous over-excitement they are now curled up (uncharacteristically) together on the bed...I have left all the notes and instructions for the cat sitter.

Classes are covered by another teacher.

Speech is printed out and here in my bag.

Wooly socks and warm gloves at the ready for cold east Hokkaido.

Ahhh......I AM looking forward to this really. I want to see east Hokkaido in winter and meet lots of interesting tourist business people. I've been doing Trip Advisor since 2004 and have loved it. Now is a wonderful chance to have some real enjoyment out of that effort.

Charisma is packed.
Okaasan - YOU are in charge!

(god help the kitchen pans.)

So. Yes :-)

Finally. Almost 4 years to the day since Okaasan came into our lives - we get her set up for outside care help.
Only once a week for now - that's the level of care she qualifies for at the moment - but it's a start.

He goes off for 10 days ski work from tomorrow ;-( and I have a week of end of year parties, two dental appointments and all sorts of other stuff - so the help is very needed.

Monday morning the sled will arrive and take her away to a pink palace of fun and stimulation. And bring her home again in late afternoon. She'll have lunch there too (and hopefully it'll be so big she won't need me to cook dinner...).
And we've ordered in Tuesday to Friday lunchbox delivery for her - this time from the convenience store 7-11. He took her yesterday to buy new slippers for the day service center. On Monday morning, before I go to work, I'll get her ready to go...

So, I have to do dinners, and underwear washing, and room cleaning, and dinner chats, and money supervision...and try to get her out for a walk sometimes.

AND my usual end of year over busy schedule......

He says the contract signing went well. This time 3 people came and talked about how it will all be etc. Okaasan seemed positive about it and even noticed with excitement that the day service center has flower arranging. But when the service staff asked Okaasan whether she ever falls down, she denied it and wasn't happy to be corrected by her son in front of strangers...
And later I found a toilet accident on the floor that she'd tried to hide....
So - we SO need this outside care. I hope that eventually they will be able to talk to her about diapers etc...I hope.

But. I am happy. I have done it. I have brought about another level of care for us all. Now the outside world knows about Okaasan and her family (well of course YOU all know!!!!) - and we can get help in future.

And. Are you sitting down? I think you should....

Tomorrow Oyomesan is going for a cooking lesson.
A Japanese food cooking lesson.......
In fact: a Japanese, traditional New Year food cooking lesson!!!

Yup. I'm gonna try and do it this year. I'm not lazily ordering from the store. I am going to try and create seasonal magic out of vegetables, soy sauce and a huge amount of sugar.
The friendly cooking teacher in my gym has invited a friend and I to go cooking in her apartment Sunday morning - both of us foreigners with Japanese families.
I am actually looking forward to this. Teachers love to be on the other end of learning - and I really would like to know the mystery of how to make something that resembles a traditional, Japanese dish.

New Year food - if I learn to make even 10% of this, I'll be happy...

4 years ago Okaasan was able to show me a little, 3  years ago she was more confused and unable - it was the terrible 5 hours cooking saga that left us both knackered and confused, 2 and 1 year ago I ordered pre-cooked food from the store.

This year? I am going to try and be an Oyomesan. Try.

Hey - guess what? I got a new hair cut. Bravely went to a new hair salon and told them to make me into a new woman....the result...

Now need a facelift to banish those baggy eyes...

Responsible. I. Am.

I am in charge again.

The Decider.
The shopper.
The cooker.
The washer.
The cleaner.
The banker.
The trash collector.
The reminder.
The checker.
The fountain of ALL conversation.

Me.

He's left for his annual piss-up with old friends down Tokyo-way. Gone a week and left me and Okaasan to cope together.

In the past this has resulted in minute by minute blog postings as I pee in trash boxes and hear stories about wartime food/Ishihara Yujiro's house/Nishi-guru/Kawagoe city/JTB guides and Korean food etc etc etc.

Who knows what this week will bring?
I expect the mystery, nightime doorbell ringer will be joining us in the next few days.
Dear Son left this morning for the airport bus without saying "Goodbye" to Okaasan. We decided that it was best that way: she won't realise he's gone till tomorrow and so no point in setting off the stress levels now.

I've hardly been involved with Okaasan in the past week as Dear Son was home and doing (most) of the above jobs. My focus was really on the cat and his giant plastic-collar, taking him out for daily walks and trying to stop him ripping out his wound stitches. The neighbors have seen a lot of me in my dressing-gown with a cup of tea....standing around while the cat sits thoughtfully in the neighboring bike garage at dawn.
Yesterday the vet finally took out the stitches and the cat is free to go fight again, or lick the wound raw and need more stitches..

Okaasan was fine. The pickles she made a week or two ago - they finally dried and she soaked them in soy sauce and carefully turned them over every day. We both noticed that she brought great focus to this task and really did it well. Did it normally, of course. But for her: well.

And she demanded wine :-) At dinner the other night I was drinking beer and Dear Son had a glass of red wine. Okaasan had green tea.
Suddenly she spied the wine across the table.
"Yujiro! I can drink wine too, you know!"
He gave her some. A tiny amount, because we've seen her tipsy and her walking/standing gets more dangerous.
"Hmm, that's a very small amount...a bit sad really...." she grumbled cheerfully. I was giggling into my beer. But she accepted her tiny amount and luckily didn't ask for more.

Giggle, giggle...that'll teach him to drink red wine in her sight. Usually we drink beer at dinner and she doesn't ask for some. If I drink white wine she maybe thinks it is water. But red wine? Oh!! Noticed THAT.

And so. Off we go - into a week of solo caring. I hope the weather is good enough that Okaasan goes walking a lot. I will knuckle down and do the dinners with her and chat.
Just a little while longer and then I hope we'll hear from the city office about day service in December. That hope is gonna keep me going this week.

Showing she CAN?

These are bits of cut up giant raddish - drying for later-pickling. A very popular, autumn activity in Japan. All over the country at the moment people in villages, towns and cities (amazing that really) are hanging up giant raddishes and drying them. It's a sign winter is approaching.

And Okaasan did too.

Absolutely amazing. So, I took a photo.

Okaasan hasn't prepped/cooked ANY food for...what?...a year or more? And suddenly this?
I went into her room late afternoon to close a window and found the curtains neatly pinned together with clothes pegs, and a kitchen basket and a plate full of raddish bits, placed by the drafts to dry.
In the kitchen was the cut off top of the raddish, a supermarket box and a receipt showing Okaasan had gone out and bought it about 2 pm yesterday.
Come home. Done all of this. And then...gone out again, as per usual, about 4 pm.

Really amazing. She looks at cooking shows on TV endlessly, she writes down recipes, she stares at recipes in magazines, she cuts them out etc etc But she never actually DOES anything.
It is a real clearing of the dementia fog. This is something she has probably done every autumn of her adult life. And I bet she helped her mother do this as a child too. Something yesterday - maybe on TV - made her get up and go shopping and prep the raddish for autumn.
I am not exagerating, she really never, ever preps any food. Once in a blue moon heats rice and an egg in a pan (and burns it), heats and forgets things in the microwave occasionally, boils water in the kettle. That is it. Not Decide/Shop/Prepare something.

5.30 pm Okaasan comes home. I help her into the kitchen with a plastic pot of Oden (simmered veggies and fishpaste sold in convenience stores). Great. If she is eating this at 5.30 pm she won't need dinner at 7 pm. I go to the toilet and come back to the kitchen. Okaasan is looking at TWO pots of Oden on the table.
"Did you buy this? Who bought this?"
Well, obviously not me...

In her bag she had one pot, in her hand she had a second pot. She had gone to two different shops? The same shop? And bought the same thing. Buying Oden actually involves standing for a few minutes and talking to the shop staff, because it's displayed in hot tanks on the counter and the staff fish out the bits that the customer orders.
So, Okaasan had stood twice yesterday afternoon talking to two staff in one or two shops, ordering the same thing. And bring it it home.
She was pretty surprised to see two pots :-)

I was happy. Easy Saturday night for me. Yujiro was out at a party. Okaasan could eat her Oden. And I could have a quiet, relaxing dinner myself later by the TV. Easy. No dinner chat required at the kitchen table.

So, there. Another odd day in dementia.
Clearing of the dementia fog to prepare a seasonal food. And then complete fog-out a few hours later by shopping for the same thing twice.

Later Yujiro and I talked about it and he said:
"Sometimes recently I feel she is making a real effort to DO things, to show us somehow that she may be old, but she isn't incapable etc. She wants to wash dishes, the wants to prep food like this."

I agree....to a point. We never talk to Okaasan directly about her dementia. But I think on a basic level she does recognise her failing abilities and every-now-and-then she seems determined to DO stuff. It's great. It shows the woman she was is still there - wrapped in a fog of mindlessness a lot of the time - but breaking thru it sometimes.
The "sometimes" is "sometimes" though. The very fact of my amazement at finding the drying raddish shows what a rarity this kind of activity is for her. It's a parting of the fog for a moment. And then fog returns.

And tomorrow? 9.30 am. Cometh the day care manager.
She'll see the drying raddishes too. Hope that doesn't gain Okaasan too many ability points! Glad I've left the room uncleaned. :-)

Finishing with cute cat picture.
Sunday morning with the newspapers.
In the newspapers? Under the newspapers?

Escape.

Went to a movie last night.
Well - a "film", cos after all - I AM British!


Such a small thing. But felt so good.
He was off at a ski teachers' end-of-another-season drinking party and I really couldn't face another dinner with Okaasan. Not on a Friday evening.

Our local park gets into spring.

Brrrrrrrr!!!! at 8 am.

My favorite tree .

Thursday was slightly better, because his customer cancelled and he came home early enough for family dinner - I got home at 7.30pm and we could sit there across the table from Okaasan doing the double act of chat for her to participate in when she wanted to.
But last night was MY time.


Okaasan saw enough of us during the day I think: in the morning in the kitchen as we were getting ready for work, and I prepped her lunch and left the flasks on the table; and then again late afternoon I came home to...wash up her lunch things.... feed cats... and prep more food for Okaasan - this time I left flat fish already cooked, and soup part-heated, and rice and Japanese spring veggies on the table.


She went out walking at 6 pm - for 2 weeks now she has been completely fixed in the local Seiyu and Macdonalds walk. I don't think she's been downtown by subway at all - every single day she has walked to the Seiyu shopping center 15 mins from home - and this week has managed to come home again without getting lost - does she remember my instructions: "Turn left at the traffic signals, NOT the park entrance" ?
We've talked - well mainly of course I have talked - endlessly about cherry blossoms in the city parks...but Okaasan hasn't gone to see any of them. Every day she just walked down to the shopping center and back again. The absolute routine.


Anyway, the movie and a quick dinner out was good - I feel my mood lift as soon as I get to the subway station and get on the train. I saw The Artist, the black and white, silent film about old Hollywood stars of the silent era - the real star of the film is the Jack Russell dog actor - who reminded me of Dad and Jane's dogs.


I got home about 9.45 pm. Okaasan was still awake and we just did basic chat in the kitchen, she didn't ask where I'd been, but the fish was mostly eaten and the rest too. So all ok. I am glad that we can still leave her like this with food prepped, that she can just about heat it and serve it and eat it herself.


And this weekend? Oh joy! It is Mother's Day tomorrow and we are planning a Family Trip out to a department store to help Okaasan buy summer clothes and shoes.
Dementia robs you of the ability to look and decide, and look again and choose...so shopping is a looooong process.
I will report from the front line soon. :-)

Getting in some help.

Gonna have a lunch box delivery service next week, and maybe beyond, to give me a  chance to breath.


So happy about that. A big part of my brain is jumping up and down making whooping sounds. ;-))


We did it before - 2 years ago? - and now we decided to bring it in again.


He came home last night with his ski teaching schedule into February ....day after day after day of being away basically. A night or two passing through home. But basically away till February 4.


I said I couldn't. Needed help.
No big drama. I just suggested the hot lunch delivery service and he agreed.


Making lunch for Okaasan ISN'T hard. It's troublesome, and in a busy working week it is One More Thing To Do. The past week we haven't had heavy snowfall, if we do, then clearing snow outside the front door will ALSO have to be factored into the morning duties.


Usually, sometime between a shower/getting dressed/packing my work bag/settling the cats/finding my house keys....somewhere in there I am usually in the kitchen heating up something/quickly cooking something to put in Okaasan's lunch flask, heating up the rice, cutting up some pickles, putting some kind of vegetable out, putting the instant soup packs in a bowl etc


Then, when I come home, I usually wash all the dirty plates because she doesn't. She thinks she will "after a bit of TV and a sit", but she doesn't.
And in between work I am thinking about the shopping for this: what kind of sloppy food I can make to put in the flasks.
The other day I risked giving her a half cooked flat fish, showed her the fish and explained she just had to heat it. Left her to it. Came home 6 hours later wondering if I'd find a burned pan...or worse. But she HAD managed to do it with minimal burn.


Okaasaan really can't cook. Just about heat something up. Put an egg in a pan of soup. Can't really use the microwave. She wouldn't starve. But she wouldn't eat well, and the kitchen would look like chimpanzee cooking day at the zoo....because she doesn't wash or put away stuff. And last summer we were getting to the 3 burned pans a week stage...which added a whole other task into the late afternoon...scrubbing the pans usable again.


So. Hot lunch delivery service commeth. Okaasan had it before and it was ok. But after a while she said she got bored with the food and wanted to go out for lunch. Was that winter? I don't remember.


So happy about this. 
Yes, I CAN do it. But day after day on my own - not to mention the whole dinner duties too and what-to-talk-about - it is just grim. When he is here we take turns with it all, and it doesn't seem so bad. If he is away for a week and more - I think I might go pop.
Of course I could make more time in my morning - get up earlier, stop wasting away time playing Wordscraper games on Facebook etc...stop going to the gym in the late afternoon and shop and go home and pre-cook stuff.


But why should I?


I have a life. This isn't my mother. This family isn't poor. Paying for a hot lunch to be delivered to this old lady would be a BIG help.


I'll take it.


One of my students was so excited to hear about this today, she said it could be a first step in Yujiro accepting that we need outside help etc - and once again I got the Day Care Centers Are So Wonderful speech from a concerned, kind person.
I don't think this is going to lead direct to day care. Yujiro doesn't want to face THAT hurdle yet. Doesn't want to initiate the inevitable fight with Okaasan on that topic. Doesn't want to admit to himself maybe that we can't do it all.....
He is happy to let it all drift along - with he and I taking turns to make it all go smoothly. And generally it does.


But when he is away for more than a few days the balancing act becomes a lot harder and I'm reaching out for the support now.


Still have to do dinners though :-(

Disappearing acts

Guilt? Relief? I'll just close my eyes...

THIS little bugger went missing.
For 22 hours.
Had us real worried, he popped out just before dinner yesterday...and disappeared into the cold, snowy Sapporo night.
We slept and left the front door open. Today I hunted the local streets with a photo of him, called his name outside garage doors and even dug snow out of the drain pipes where he finds rats.
Nothing.
I had plans for an out of city daytrip to a hotspring with a friend...knocked that on the head and did a few hours of city center lunch instead.
Came home and hunted some more. When I was in Australia he disappeared for 48 hours. But that was autumn. Sapporo now is minus temperatures with large mounds of snow everywhere and killer-chunks of ice sliding off the subway tunnel roof.


Worried and worried.
Yujiro in between ski lessons was mailing and calling...worried too.
Bloody cat.


And then...as I looked out the window around 4 pm I saw a familiar skinny shape running down the street and in he ran, gulped a lot of water and food and looked a bit wide-eyed excited to be home....and we are none the wiser as to where he went.
Little bugger. But I love him.


And my other little bugger? Well, maybe shouldn't call Okaasan that exactly...although Lady Ga-Ga has her Little Monsters, us Brit's use "bugger" as a term of affection..as in "you daft old bugger"..


Anyway. Okaasan.
She didn't go out again today. Nice enough weather. But she didn't. This year she stays home much more.
Yujiro is staying at the ski school, so I cooked dinner for Okaasan and Me and had 45 mins. of the Korean-food-is-the-best-in-the-world-I-used-to-eat-in-a-Korean-restaurant-in-Ikebukuro-station conversation...oh I don't know..seven? nine? times. Same story. Easy to respond to.

And I has a little, significant success with New Year food cooking and Okaasan. The picture above shows the miso soup on the right, with burdock root and Japanese raddish and tofu in it...and on the left are sato imo/taro.

Last year, on that nightmarish shopping trip and cooking marathon, Okaasan bought these and peeled them and boiled them, and made the stock from fish flakes and seaweed, and then simmered them in soy sauce/cooking sake, sweet sake and a sugar plantation.

This year I bought a bag of them ready peeled and part-boiled. I added ready-made stock, a wallop of soy sauce/sake...and half a sugar plantation.

THEN after dinner I asked Okaasan's advice about the taste of the sauce.....everything was all done, she only had to taste the thing and comment.

"Hmm...nice. No, that seems good! I like these at New Year!"

THAT SEEMS GOOD! To MY cooking! Something very Japanese! GOOD!

It's a milestone.

Only taken me 3 years.

So, that's obviously the secret - do as much of the shopping and preparation of food as I can in secret....like a magician stuffing rabbits up his sleeve before a show - and then give Okaasan a chance to input at one final stage.....something simple - well actually for a British woman something like the taste of traditional Japanese food is something pretty hard. But something Okaasan can fuss about for a few minutes and advise and correct on.

Last year was awful as she couldn't remember how much of anything she'd added to the pan and kept adding more of everything in a never-ending taste balancing act.

This year: I did a guesstimate on the taste, erred on the side of probably not enough, presented it to her..and Bingo!

Phew. 3 years to learn that lesson. :-))

Roll on another year. Oh, there's another coming along in 72 hours. Lucky me.

Gloves, gloves, gloves...GLOVES!!!!

"I need to buy new gloves. A woman on the subway stole my gloves..."


Okaasan was fretting from dawn about the Stolen Gloves.
Sitting in her room constantly looking in her purse.


Yujiro was ridiculously stupid about her Stolen Gloves story and kept trying to correct her: no, no, I expect you LOST the gloves, women on the subway don't STEAL gloves, you LOST them etc etc.
I get so annoyed with him when he does this. It doesn't matter eitherway to us, but in Okaasan's worldview the STOLEN story is her reassuring story that she isn't going senile, that the outside world-woman-on-the-train did something to her. Paranoia doesn't accept Logic. Why not just nod and say a few comforting words, vageuly accept her version of events and leave it? Why challenge her version? It just winds her up and gets the whole thing more and more stressy???


Maybe I am better at doing this because I am not a precise, logical person - the world can be this...or maybe that...whichever. He needs precision, things must be THIS way, or not at all. And also maybe...I am a language teacher and spend my days faking interest in students' stories about their lives....most of the time it IS interesting, but there are times when I just fake it and smile and nod and say: "Oh really? You bought a pen for $200? How  wonderful!",


Anyway. Back to gloves.

She asked Yujiro for the money to buy gloves. We debated this at breakfast time: if we gave her the money would she actually BUY gloves, or instead forget that and come home with 10 pots of aloe yogurt and pack of expensive seaweed?
It seems so stupid to be having this kind of conversation - is the child able to go shopping alone? Okaasan isn't a child, but we have a pretty clear idea of what she'll probably do or not do in a situation.
Does she need help to buy gloves? Can she do it herself?
Decided it was probably best for Yujiro to go with her and buy the gloves - maybe on Monday.


Hmmm...still not happy. I need gloves, gloves, gloves...stolen...gloves...


When Okaasan has something she wants to do, patience isn't foremost on her mind. It must be done NOW! Today! Now!

Mid-morning she remembered?/invented the tale? that she had in fact already BOUGHT and asked the shop to hold the gloves at the department store downtown and had to go RIGHT NOW and pay for them.
Sighing, he gave her the money and she got dressed and ready to go out in 15 minutes flat - and went. No mid-morning breakfast. No thankyou. Gloves, Department Store. Now.  Amazing. Usually takes her an hour to get it together for going out.
When there is something on her mind that needs doing - 15 minutes.

Anyway, it left us a whole day to enjoy ourselves. We left her lunch in the new flasks on the kitchen table and set off for a noodle and tempura lunch at a restaurant I was know and then a hot spring...where we found we could book one of the private rooms for 90 minutes!!!! Couple time for Y3,000. Goooooooooood.


The autumn leaves are going, going, gone around Sapporo now, amazing to think that in 7 weeks from now it will all be snow covered. I hope I can ski more this year...I NEED to ski more this year!



Nice couple time out. He is off next week for his annual autumn trip to the Tokyo area to see old friends and drink the city dry. So it is good to have some time to ourselves for now - gives me good memories to hang onto when I am stuck at the kitchen table with Okaasan having dinner next week...

And we came home and Lo! and Behold! Gloves! She had bought them. Excellent. We over-worried about it. Easy to do this - to think she can't do something, when maybe...maybe she can. I think Carers do this a lot. It is hard to get the balance of how much supervision/care/life management Okaasan needs.
All ok now. New gloves bought.
Until these get stolen of course....


* And...look what I have bought....New Year lunch/dinner! I ordered it at the supermarket, for delivery on December 31st. A box of all the traditional stuff I am NOT GOING TO COOK WITH OKAASAN. NOT. COOKING. NOT. Learned that lesson last year after a 5 hour shopping/cooking biathlon. Ordering it is far, far better.

Option C?

Nope.
Didn't work.
Well, half worked, I guess.


Lunchtime stuff: she didn't eat at all. May have been because she'd just come home from the dentist and didn't feel like it.


Dinnertime she ate the raw fish, ate the salad, didn't eat the potato salad because it was too hard....and couldn't WAIT until 7 pm when the rice cooker was ready....so she went OUT for more food.


;-(


That wasn't the idea at all.
Why couldn't she wait? Or why was she trying to eat dinner before 7 pm? It's always been the time we do dinner. I found the shopping receipt that shows she was in the local supermarket at 6.47 pm....if she'd waited 30 mins there would have been freshly cooked, steaming rice in the rice cooker.


Ho hum.


Option C, which we've just come up with is : to use hot flasks and food containers. Cook up lunch in the morning before we go to work and leave it for her on the kitchen table.
All she'd have to do is open up the flasks and the hot food, rice and soup will be inside. Like food delivery service, but delivered by US to the table at 9 am when we head out to work. We used a lunch delivery service 2 years ago in winter. It was fine, but in the end Okaasan got a little bored with the food and asked us to cancel it.


This weekend we'll go and look at flasks etc and see if Option C is workable. Can't do any more burned pans.
I know this all seems like mountains-out-of-molehills - but that's the daily life stuff that occupies our minds with Okaasan. How to make things easy for a lady who has failing abilities, while maintaining the cheerful facade that "nothing is wrong"....
SHE thinks she can heat up stuff in pans and feed herself. 
We know that left to herself in the kitchen she burns the pans and leaves uneaten or half-eaten food out on the counter or table.
She'll never go hungry because she can find the food on the table or fridge and help herself, and she can go shopping and buy pre-cooked or cold food.
But the rice/egg/soup cooking in the pans isn't so successful anymore and as winter arrives she won't be able to get out and shop.
We have to find a way of giving her hot food at lunchtime, without her using pans and the cooker.




On a different topic: Okaasan and her memo making.
She is always doing this. Sitting in front of the TV making memos about recipes and TV shopping telephone numbers etc etc. When she isn't writing memos on scraps of paper she is picking them up from the table and carpet around her and looking at them thoughtfully, setting them to one side....and then minutes later picking up the same memo.
It's obviously a self-preservation method against the deep-down knowledge that she IS forgetting important stuff.


The other day one of the memos ended up mixed in with our post. Maybe she'd left it on the kitchen table and it got scooped up with letters.
Anyway: it's for a recipe for noodles and sesame sauce, other random bits of writing...and this:


"To prevent the onset of dementia it is important to focus on yourself and give up trying to be a good wife and mother". (this was in Japanese of course).


How true! Yes, absolutely.


It comes back to what I reckon is my biggest question about dementia - how far Okaasan understand her own condition - truely, deeply inside herself.
I think she must know, must worry about it and hopefully accept that we will help out when things get a bit mixed up.
When she sees programs on TV about dementia does she think - "oh, I should watch this, it may help me"...or is it more "one day I may be like this, how sad for these people".??


When she is asking me about which trash goes in which box, or what day of the week it is, or what she ate for lunch - all of those kind of questions about things she would usually know, but now isn't sure about - is she acknowledging that things are falling away bit by bit?


Anyway. Interesting to find Okaasan making memos about dementia!

Pumpkin partners. Not.

Okaasan showed interest in cooking again.
It's that rare an occurance that it merits a blog entry.
This lady who long-ago attended a highclass Tokyo cooking school, who spent years as a Super Wife cooking for the family and staff parties ...now can just about heat up soup, pour hot water on instant noodles and peel a vegetable.


And then on Friday evening.
I was settling into some quiet time making pumpkin stew when Okaasan came home and noticed what I was DOING IT WRONG.
First she was shocked to see me peeling the pumpkin (actually only some pieces to make the all-orange stew base), and then I was using a knife to take out the seeds - NO! No! No!
She saw these terrible deeds from her room....and ran into the kitchen to set me straight.
Don't peel the pumpkin! It's wasteful! In Japan we eat the pumpkin skin!
Don't use a knife, use your fingers like this!


Grrrrr..........
Inside my head I was fighting my feelings.
Good Oyomesan - ahh, must encourage her to show off her skills, must thank her for teaching me something, dementia people need to feel useful blah blah blah....
Bad Oyomesan - get OUT of my kitchen and go back to watching TV pleeeese.....I can make pumpkin stew without your help...pleeese let me have this quiet time in the kitchen to myself...pleeeese go away.


I managed to be Good Oyomesan. I thanked her for teaching me etc. Then.... I went upstairs and stayed away for 20 mins., hoping that it was enough time for Okaasan to forget about the pumpkin cooking and settle down by the TV again...
And it was. When I came back to the kitchen she was down under the kotatsu heated table entranced by some noisy, talentless people TV show again....and I could complete my pumpkin stew in peace.


Okaasan hardly ever shows an interest in our cooking in the kitchen. She usually drifts through and into her room or the toilet or bathroom, just barely noticing what we are doing.. until we call her to come into the kitchen for a meal. I am so, SO glad for this - everything would take 10 times longer and be 10 times more stressful if she wanted to be there too.
There is always "The Way"/ "The Japanese Way" to do things. And MY way of doing something is totally wrong.


I know helping to prepare food is good for her brain activating and hand dexterity, but I hope to keep it to the current level where she fixes her own lunch from stuff we've left out for her - heats up the food, boils an egg, burns a pan....if she started taking part in the evening meal prepping it would be a nightmare.
Here's hoping the pumpkin partnership was a one-off.

Avoiding cooking....

Butterbur done.
Finally.


Not going to include a picture: it looks just the same as it did on Friday. Just now it has a fishy/soy sauce taste.


Getting Okaasan to DO it was like getting a reluctant child to finish a rashly started school project. I enthused about the butterbur and got her up off the carpet and away from the TV and into the kitchen.
I put out the seaweed, the fish flakes and the soy sauce on the table along with the printed out recipe and left her to it...peering at the recipe and clasping a large bag of sugar.


Absolutely determined NOT to help her. My stress levels don't need it. I lost two ovaries to stress last summer and I'm hanging on to my other body parts! The New Year cooking thing taught me to never, ever, EVER stand in the kitchen and cook with Okaasan again.
If she bought butterbur - she's gonna have to cook it.


I retreated to the front step to transplant seedlings. I've had seed trays in Okaasan's room (out of cats' way) for a month now and lots of tiny green leaves have appeared. So thrilling! All taken from a blue, bell-like plant in the garden last autumn.
So, while Okaasan struggled with peeling the butterbur yet again and drowning them in flavoring, Yujiro made computer charts  for optimum velotaxi business...and I transplanted seeds on the doorstep in the rain with the cats.
Each to his own.
I really don't have the patience or interest to spend so much time on cooking something like this butterbur. It isn't so delicious that it's worth all this time. The same could be said for seeds and seedlings of course - why bother? just go and buy the plants at the gardening center!


But I enjoy the gardening and the seeds. I'm afraid I can't get excited about hours and hours of peeling wild celery/rhubarb and seasoning it. 


Anyway. It's done. Enough butterbur for days. Hope she doesn't buy any more. ;-))
We all had lunch together and in the evening we left sushi for Okaasan and went out for a date with eachother to another cheap coupon meal place...it was a former highclass bar in Susukino now doing food...and I got to touch a baseball signed by Darvish....


...and ended the day hilariously by literally picking a drunk old man off the pavement and walking him home...he was a sweet old drunk who said he'd had a  fight with his wife and got drunk to spite her. He was a bit vague on where he lived, but after 25 minutes and a trip to the police station we finally delivered him to the door of a posh retirement complex and ran away giggleing in the night as he staggered into the entrance hall.


May 21. World didn't end here. Still have butterbur to eat.


*  I'm currently rereading one of my books about dementia...noticing things that Okaasan now does/doesn't do more than a year ago...will write more later about that.

Yay!!!!....no.....

Butterbur! Cooked! By Okaasan!
Yay!!!!!!

Err...no......

She says it isn't done yet. Needs drowning in the soy sauce/cooking sake/sugar sauce that all Japanese food gets put in.

Disappointed. I tasted some of this nice fresh green butterbur last night secretly and it tastes ok. Kind of like celery.
I wish we could leave it like this and put soy sauce on the table so everyone could help themselves. But no....it'll all be drowned in the Japanese seasoning.

Anyway - this morning we did manage to get Okaasan up and ready and out for the 9 am dentist appointment. But she really needs constantly reminding and motivating. Yujiro got her all up and moving around choosing clothes - he came upstairs to have breakfast - and went back 15 minutes later to find her sitting back in front of the TV again with no clothes chosen.
By the time he was in his outside clothes and I was jangling car keys in the kitchen Okaasan got it together that she was going out SOON! and got dressed and ready to go.

Finally...just flower shots...my garden is coming out into spring and the tomato and cucumber seedlings are in. The green pepper plant might not be reborn into its third summer...and the cats keep trying to dig up potatoes. But hey! Spring!

A "normal" weekend.

Sorry - didn't blog. Was too busy living it!


All ok with Okaasan - as normal as we do in this household.


I left lunchtime food out for her Saturday and she managed to heat it up and eat it.


Saturday night she came home late and I'd already eaten at 7 pm, but I got back into the kitchen for 7.40 pm and heated up her food, chatted for a few minutes and then used the "8pm friend telephone call from England coming" excuse to leave her.
Yujiro is more accommodating about dinner time and Okaasan coming home late. I'm not. I left for work at 9.15 am, I did 5 classes, I got home just after 6 pm. Changed my clothes and stood in the kitchen for 30 mins preparing dinner: by 7 pm I am going to sit down and eat it.
Whether Okaasan is here or not. (A little happily not!)


Sunday was a relaxed day.
I stayed home mostly daytime watching Japan actually WIN the Asia Cup, playing with cats and hanging all the pictures/paintings/prints that came from England.

Lunchtime I gave Okaasan some face time. I cooked squid and ginger for her, with rice, salad, soup and pickles. I ate left overs.

Conversation 1.: Japanese football fans/Nihonbashi....my father/husband had an office near Nihonbashi and he forgot something and I brought it from home and he gave me money and told me I could buy any food I liked.

Conversation 2.: Football - we didn't have football in Japan in the war, Yujiro did football lessons when he was a child because I signed him up for them. My husband said baseball was too dangerous. He played tennis. He had an office near Nihonbashi....

Each conversation kind of blended with the other and I noticed that on each retelling the husband/father got switched and mixed up - sometimes in consecutive sentences.

Anyway. All ok. After lunch I got Okaasan to hunt down and tie up newspapers for recycling, while I emptied her trash boxes. Praised her for the way she ties newspapers up. Settled her back down with the TV and a cup of tea.

Late afternoon I went out to see Social Network with a friend and have dinner. I got home at 9 pm to a VERY smelly kitchen: Okaasan had burned the saucepan again trying to cook rice in water and forgetting it. But at least the house was still standing and she was asleep by the TV.

Even if we leave a note about HOW to heat up pre-cooked rice in the microwave she prefers to cook it in a pan of water or soup. I did wonder about buying a one-person rice cooker and leaving it for her every day, but I think she would still do the rice-in-pan style.

I've read that elderly dementia sufferers lose their abilities with recently learned technology and go back to what existed as a child. Japan HAD electric rice cookers by the late 1950s, but I am guessing Okaasan is already cooking in pre-war style where you put the rice in a pan. But of course, in the minutes it takes for the water to heat her attention has moved onto something else and it burns. ThankGOODNESS we bought the electric cooker that cuts out on overheating.

And so. I have another burned pan to try and resuscitate.

Fellowship of Carers: It's a funny thing. If you meet someone who is also a Carer of a Dementia Sufferer. Bingo! Instant connection. A new student started Saturday and in our opening conversation he mentioned that he and his wife are caring for his mother, who has Alzheimer's. All lesson plan flew out the window and we poured out and shared our experiences with eachother: Oh! The Random Shopping! Oh! The Date Mix-ups! Oh! The People Mix-ups! Oh! The Lack of Personal Hygiene!

It was great. A problem shared is a problem halved. At least for a while.

Now: burned pans. Anyone got a good way to rescue it?