My Mom, my Mother-in-Law, and Me

Fourth of July weekend I stood in a kitchen on the California coast with both my mother-in-law and my mother.  When my mother called loudly, “Kimberly Ford!” I turned from the refrigerator with the half-and-half in my hand.

It sounded like I was in trouble.  It sounded like my mom, who never uses this tone, was admonishing a toddler. The words were also strange because my mom had used my maiden name, the name she’d given me and had used for more than half my forty-two years.  The name made me worry that my mother-in-law, standing beside my mother, might think that I had somehow clung to an old self, that I was still considered, by family and friends in California, not the “Chisholm” I so fully feel myself to be.

“What?” I asked, not understanding why my mom was now faintly shaking her head, lips pressed together as though I really were in trouble.

“We just—” she started to say, waving a hand to include Bill’s mom, who stood nodding.

My mom . . .

And then I understood.

These two women had each spent two nights of the week before watching our kids—ages nine, eleven and thirteen—while I stowed away in Bill’s luggage on his business trip to Paris.

Though we were in France, I had remained a mere text away and there had been a handful of messages back and forth about carpools and the location of baseball gloves and, yes, about blood glucose readings.

Both my mother and mother-in-law, when we returned, had mentioned that Will’s numbers had been high at bedtime.

...and her partner-in-crime, my mother-in-law, mastermind behind the short-sheeting of our bed the night before this conversation!

On the five-page, single-spaced list of instructions that I’d written up before leaving, the only thing I’d stipulated about bedtime was that Will be over 100.

For Will and me, a 210 at bedtime means staying up a little later—sometimes a lot later—to be sure he’s trending downward, and not too quickly.

A high at bedtime is a hassle, but Will, at thirteen, never minds staying up late reading, not even until one or two in the morning.  This is especially fine in the summer.  What am I saying . . . it’s fine all year round, given how his lax mother lets him sleep in during the school year even if that means missing his first couple classes.

I simply hadn’t thought to mention a nighttime high.

This was because, when I sat down to write up the instructions, the thought of bedtime had made me almost physically sick.  The specter of a nighttime low is especially scary, an anxiety-provoking thought that made me wonder if four days in France were worth leaving my kids: the thought of the nighttime hypoglycemic event that might’ve led any of my son’s four grandparents coming into his room in the morning to find the boy in a coma.

The day we came back, though, when my mom and my mother-in-law had tried to tell me that Will’s numbers had been high, their comments were made while presents of scarves and French-milled soaps were being opened and while I listened to my kids’ excitement about ice cream outings and swim dates and how my youngest son had finally made it all the way to the Izombie level of Plants Versus Zombies with his grandmother, my mom, who “totally owned” the game.

Here in the early-morning kitchen, though, it was only the three of us mothers.

“It’s just—” my mom began.  “It’s awful.”

“It’s awful for you,” Bill’s mom said, “and it’s awful for Will.”

“Yes!” my mom said.  “It’s awful for both of you.  For all of you.”

I stood with the carton of half-and-half in hand.  This was the point when I should have reassured them, both so caring and clearly unsettled, that managing this disease isn’t all that awful.  I might’ve said that high numbers hardly ever happen.  I should’ve told them that staying up late or waking to check Will in the middle of the night or driving to school at noon with extra testing strips or spending an hour on the phone with the diabetes educator instead of getting my work done, that all of it was no big deal, that we’d gotten it all figured out, that the whole thing—the minute-by-minute management of an extremely complex disease—had become downright easy after eighteen months.

I stood there, not saying a thing.

“We just don’t know,” my mom shook her head, “how you do it.”

Tagged as: grandparents