OMG What Happened To My Mother

My mother is teetering on the edge of old age. This will come as a shock to her. Just as it does to all of us when our advanced years creep up and slap us sideways in the reality place... but try as I might, I can't hide this fact from her anymore.

Mom, you're a click from ancient. I say this with all due love and respect, but it's time to face facts.

First of all, when I called my mother the other day to chat, she answered and only a few minutes into the conversation she informed me that she could only talk for a moment or two because she was getting ready to go out to dinner with my step-father. Which wouldn't be any kind of big deal, except it was 4 pm at her house.

WTF?!?

I know that until they moved to Georgia, they were Jersey natives that went to dinner at 8 pm like all tri-state residents who don't have school-aged children. They ordered take-out and delivery and if you called at 10 pm and actually caught them at home, you were interrupting the first 20 minutes of some movie. I'd get emails timestamped 2 am and they were always attending wakes and funerals of their much older friends and heading off to bunco and 'functions'. My mom went to NY once a month on a theater-day-trip with my aunt. My step-father was usually busy with the lodge. They were active-life-middle-aged-busy-New-Jersians.

Now they've got dinner reservations at 5 pm.

And my mother is constantly updating me on their garden. When friends have come to visit, they help 'in the garden'. I hear about bugs eating the parsley and what vegetables are ready to be picked. I mean, they had a garden in NJ, but I never heard about it. It wasn't the central theme in their life.

Now, it is... along with getting ready for dinner at 4 pm.

Well, the garden, the early-bird dinner reservations, and whatever my step-father is off doing with their new neighbor and his best-country-buddy Shorty. Swear. His name is Shorty. Now, instead of lodge functions, my step-father is off at tractor pulls and farm-implement-auctions and some festival that was so eyeroll-inducing that I can't even remember what the hell it was for, except that there was some tree hugger or some such shit on duty for the entirety of the festival and it was a big ass deal to be chosen.

WTF?!? *foreheadslap*

I've been in Texas for three years and I haven't been as countrified as my mother and step-father have become in under a year. Maybe it's the 5 pm dinner reservations and the turtle that was a beginning-of-the-summer-season inhabitant in their salt-water pool. I don't fucking know. I just know they've lost their urban-friggin'-minds.

I called yesterday as I was fixing dinner to inform my mother that she was precariously poised on the edge of old age because I started the dreaded universal female event of hot flashes. She however will not be old until my younger sister starts having them. Although, since my mom seems to be begging to be added to the old category early, when I couldn't reach her at 5:30 her time, I assumed that she was battling bugs in the garden or out at a restaurant, finishing her desert.

And yes, I said that I started having hot flashes. Last week it was hair bumps zits on my inner thighs and this week it's hot flashes. Looking like I got stuck under the sprinkler-system in Target and again at the library yesterday. Hey Body: Pick a lane, any lane!

Must be why my mother is acting so old-ladyish. It's my turn to be middle aged. 38 is a little young, but considering how I lived in my 20's, I'm luckier than a clover carrying leprechaun to be alive at all I'll take it. As long as I've still got at least a good 20 years before I have to start gardening and going out to eat at 5 pm after attending tree-hugging festivals...

I'm one up on her in the country-friend department though. My brother-in-law lives two doors down and is named Buzzy. Top that, Mom.