hi from the jam in the generation sandwich

A few months ago, I took the prince to the Science Museum when a buddy of his and his mom had an extra pair of tickets and invited him/us. He and his friend had a great time playing with different interactive exhibits, as kids do in a science museum, and at one point I followed him to a little mini-room that he'd gone into to have a look, and as soon as I got there he'd had enough of whatever was in there and came running out past me and by the time I'd turned around he'd gone around a corner; by the time I got to that corner I couldn't see him at all. The place wasn't crowded, and it wasn't that big, but he'd disappeared somewhere. I asked the few people nearby if they'd seen which way he went; and then I wandered around for a couple of minutes looking for him; and then I found the buddy and his mom and told them I hadn't seen my kid in several minutes, and she made her kid stop what he was doing so all three of us could look for him together; and then I asked a couple of employees who were staffing a controlled-entry room if they'd seen him; and just before I would have gone to the front desk and had him paged, he reappeared from somewhere, unaware (of course) that I hadn't known where he was the whole time. I was telling his dad and a couple of our friends about it later that afternoon, after we'd got home, and described it as not quite panicking but definitely clearing the decks for a proper mama-bear panic. I can almost physically remember the sensation: It was just like taking care of all the trivial day-to-day bullshit you deal with at work so you can really focus on the big project that needs all your attention, and the big project that needs all your attention is WHERE THE HELL IS MY KID?!

I mention this because yesterday I went to pick my mom up and bring her to dinner at my house, which is unusual for a Monday. We have family dinner every Sunday, that is, Himself and the prince and myself and my in-laws, who live in our neighborhood, and now that my mom is in town of course she comes along as well, and this Sunday we said "Oh, tomorrow is Labor Day, we'll be grilling, do you want to come along two days in a row?" and she said "How nice," and so I went to get her on Monday just as I had done on Sunday—by which time she had forgotten that we'd made this plan. She'd had a rough day, as it happens, which had led to her having an unscheduled nap that apparently took up most of her afternoon, and sure, the first few minutes after you wake up from a nap can be kind of a fuzzy time even if you don't have a traumatic brain injury and subsequent progressive dementia. But the look on her face when she said "What . . . are you doing here?" gave me the same kind of feeling in my bones that I remember having when I was almost ready to decide it was time to freak out in that science museum. All the times she's actually been (for example) in the ICU and not even able to open her eyes, or post-surgical and still completely delusional from the anesthesia, she's still always recognized us, but yesterday I was about one second shy of concluding she actually didn't know who I was, and the second before the words "Mom, it's me" would have come out of my mouth must have lasted for whole minutes, the same amount of time I didn't know where my boy was that day last spring.

It was a look into the future that I didn't like at all. (I'm going to be talking to my own doctor about Doing Something about the anxiety I'm dealing with at the moment, because my blood pressure—for which I'm already medicated—is not handling things well. Please secure your own mask before attempting to assist others, and all that.)