Time Travelers

My mother, the rock, the matriarch, the center of our family universe, slipped and fell in her house on April 28, 2004, splitting open her forearm from elbow to wrist on the bolt of the lock on the bathroom door. The cut was so severe it required more than 50 stitches to close it. Had Ma been younger, this might have simply been a painful accident. But when she fell, my mother had just turned 80 and had been, we learned later, experiencing mini strokes for God knows how long.

At the time, I had two young children and two old parents, with more than seventy years separating them. But when Ma fell backward in her bathroom, she also tumbled backward in time. In one day, she erased seven decades and magically, horribly, instantly became another one of my children. something she never, ever wanted to be. So did my father, because when Ma fell, she took Daddy backward with her.

With each post, I'll tell a little more about our story and what it's like to be a sandwich generation foot soldier.