If you have ever looked after young children, you will remember how tiring it was. Primarily because the child/ children always needed personal interaction. Hardly had they settled into one activity than they were looking for entertainment in the next activity.
My mother’s memory isn’t firing on all cylinders. Her advanced age and background health issues mean that she is increasingly forgetful and tired. I cannot stop this ageing progress but I am determined to help her engage with daily activities in a way that is meaningful and fun.
I spend a lot of time devising activities and games that purposefully requires my mother’s personal input. I actually want her to ask questions, keep busy, stay focused. We do physical exercises, writing, singing, crafts. I always knew how to work with my own children in a classroom setting. What I now realise is that those skills are equally valuable when working with a person whose cognitive function is in steady decline. The only difference is that I am now the one talking non-stop. At the end of the day I am as tired as when I was a very young mother.
I am a very practical person. At her age, my mother is not going to enrol in university to do a PhD in Maths, so I don’t see any reason to torture her with anything more than basic counting and timetables up to 12. Making one or two-syllable words from Bananagrams tiles instead of doing grammar workbooks. I introduced the NY Times’ Spelling Bee (my daily fix) but my mother found it taxing. A good plan was to let her listen first to books on Audible then reading them aloud as a voice strengthening exercise.
Spelling together: one for me, one for you
To maintain manual dexterity I try to link crafts to what else we are doing. We ate pineapple tarts (from Delectable and quite addictive) and made some from Play-Doh. Then I told my mother to squeeze some TheraPutty, realising later that this was quite unnecessary in my grandmother’s day. They had to wash clothes by hand, and the constant wringing to remove water would be good enough exercise for the fingers. I am now thinking of kneading my bread dough by hand instead of using a machine.
My mother’s voice is getting softer and I am very keen to get her to speak more and to speak louder. Today I was piqued by Google’s AI tool Gemini, styled as ‘your personal AI assistant’. The first question I asked was not why it was called Gemini but ‘give me a recipe for banana cake’.
Then it was my mother’s turn. I cautioned her to articulate the question clearly (again, another voice strengthening exercise). The question was: give me a recipe for Hainanese chicken rice. The first time the question was asked it was recorded as ‘give me a recipe for Highland chicken rice’, so she had to ask again.
Then we had a very entertaining time with the following questions:
What is the weather in Kuala Lumpur today?
What is the best ice cream in the world?
Is it going to rain in Kuala Lumpur today?
What is the stock market forecast for Kuala Lumpur this month?
I want to improve my brain power.
Whose mother is the most beautiful mother in the world?
How do I grow a banana tree?
Do I need to go to school?
Is physiotherapy good for us?
Should I use chopsticks to eat porridge?
Is salmon good for my brain?
I thought it would be cheeky to ask: does my husband love me? My mother burst out laughing and said of my father (in Cantonese) that he has been dead for some time now. At least my mother thought it was funny. Mr Gochugaru, on the other side of the living room, was curious to know if he had made the cut according to Gemini’s assessment.
How do I grow a banana tree?
Sometimes I get my mother to write Chinese characters then to have small conversations in Mandarin. When we cannot think of a word I tell her there is now a dictionary on the phone. Cue Google Translate which my mother thinks is amazing.
Tonight we will both rest and tomorrow we will start all over again. When I work with my mother, I sometimes ask of the space we are in: is this a room of remembering or a room of forgetting? I hope it is both, that my mother can remember the immediate fun of our daily sessions, whilst at the same time forgetting everything she was unhappy about in the life previous to this moment.