Family duties

Yesterday on my way to work I got a frantic phone call from my mother asking me to come over and look at her eye. A little background information is that she had some vision issues a while ago where she lost sight in her left eye. She can still drive since you need 180 degree peripheral vision and she does have that. But it seems as though if something is going to go wrong with her, it happens to her right eye, the only good one. So on Monday she called me and said "come look at my eye". Apparently she caught the fun cold the girls and I muddled through and ended up with a pinkish eye. So I abandoned my trip to work to investigate.

Turns out her eye wasn't any more red than anyone else with a head cold but you can't tell with these things. In any event I took her to the DR, dropped Dad off at Hilltop so he could do some pre-holiday shopping and then picked everyone up and headed back home.

When did we all switch roles? I think when I became a mother it started to reach further than my own children and I have in some ways switched roles with my parents. It's daunting really and I wish that I had had kids earlier so that they could have been more independent when my kids are small. The still get around well and it's not like they are housebound but they certainly did much more only 5 years ago.

They are still some of the most important people in my children's lives but it's funny to look at my father and not really see any changes in him in my mind's eye. But yet my kids have never known him to drive a car, work a full time job or whip up a set of brick stairs. They never saw my mother in her scrubs heading off to care for the ailing in her nursely duties. Then again when my grandparents came to live next door to us I didn't see any of these things with them either. So yet again I am in realization that the cycle of life really does for the most part repeat.