Where did the week go? How can it be Friday already? Life sure seems to speed up a little more every year. When I finish this blog, I need to go back into the sound booth and record more chapters for my audiobooks. It’s taking me forever but will hopefully be so worth it in the end.
I’m trying to have Escape to Jekyll Island ready to release on Audible in a couple of weeks. Then I’ll be releasing the other three – maybe a new one every couple of weeks? I’d like to just do a big dump, but everybody says that’s not the proper way to market. Gotta make the readers really want the next one. Ugh. I love to read, and I love it when I finish a really good book and the next one in the series is available immediately. Maybe someday I’ll be successful enough that I won’t have to worry about “teasing” my readers. If I stay on target, the first four books will come out in June and July and then Book 5 will come out in August in all three formats (paperback, e-book, and audible). I need to get this series finished because I’m super excited about the next series and I can’t start writing that one until I finish this one.
I’ve been crashing through work on my desk because it promises to be a beautiful beach weekend. Spring and fall are really the best beach seasons – in the summer, it’s hard to sit for long because it’s too darned hot. Those are the times I miss the clear waters around Vieques, Puerto Rico – on really hot days, we took our drinks into the water and sat on our bums in the shallow part to stay cool. Some guys set up a table and chairs in knee-deep water to play dominos. You can’t do that here on Jekyll. We have some waves.
Mom wants some beach time this weekend, too. That’s a good AND bad thing. Let me explain.
My mom was the original sun worshipper. When I was a kid, we spent summers in Bethany Beach, Delaware. Mom would lie on the beach for hours coated in that fancy-schmancy Tropical Sun oil that us kids weren’t allowed to touch. She never got sunburn. We didn’t even have sunscreen at our beach house until I hit high school, after they got sick of listening to my girlfriends whining about getting fried. Enter the giant pink bottle of NO-AD SPF 15 from Costco (right after those huge stores first opened). That was the strongest (and cheapest) stuff you could buy at the time.
For the record, the sunscreen wasn’t for me or my siblings, and we weren’t supposed to use it – it was for pale houseguests. We were expected to get really burnt at the beginning of the summer – once – and then we should just get tanner after that. If we used anything as kids, it was baby oil. Yep, really.
Fast-forward 40 or so years (ahem) and now, we all know we shouldn’t have exposed our skin that way and for so long. I didn’t really wear sunscreen even when we lived in the Caribbean because anything I put on my face got sweated off or into my eyes. And if you’ve gotten sunscreen in your eye, you know what I’m talking about. That stuff burns all day.
Anyway, all the old people are getting spots of skin cancer removed and that should be enough to terrify the rest of us. I’ve been lucky so far – I just have melasma and that I can hide by getting more tan (nope, not kidding) – but really, my mom and I should just be walking commercials for what-not-to-do for skincare on the beach.
Yes, I wear sunscreen daily now. At least on my face, and on my shoulders and chest, too, at the beach. It’s because I burn more easily (hello old age, again). I still put oil on my legs. I have the age-old lifeguard problem where my shins always stay 20 shades lighter than the rest of me. In her 60s, Mom started wearing daily moisturizer with sunscreen in it – technically, she still does – but I doubt she remembers her skincare routine most days.
So anyway, mom live on St. Simons Island next door to Jekyll, and she came over to go to the beach with us before we left on our cruise with her last month. We were trying to get a base before being outside all day on the trip. A girlfriend and I were waiting at our house with everything ready to go when mom arrived with my husband, Bill. She was not dressed for the beach. But she was carrying a tote bag, so I figured she had her beach stuff in there. She did not.
Fortunately, she’d brought her bathing suit. Unfortunately, she planned to wear it with a pair of $300 Tieks ballet flats. To the beach (audible gasp). So, I gave her some of my flip flops, sunglasses, and a beach coverup (brave move because she keeps stealing my favorite ones) and we loaded up and went.
After we got settled in our beach chairs under our fabulous Shibumi, one of my girlfriends asked my mom if she was wearing sunscreen. Oops! I hadn’t even thought of that. Last summer, mom didn’t want to go to the beach – it was some kind of Alzheimer’s stage. This year, she wants to go all the time. But she doesn’t want to wear any sunscreen. Ay Dios mio.
I got her coated up and put some on her face even though she said she didn’t want any and then left her alone. She wouldn’t come into the shade – she took up her traditional sunbathing position in a reclined chair and closed her eyes. The only times she moved were to comment on the ongoing conversation or flip over. I reapplied her sunscreen halfway through the day. So, what happened? When we got home, mom was a lobster.
To be fair, so was I. I hadn’t done my shoulders well enough or re-applied, and I was sore. Like the damn my bra is killing me kind of tender. It was a long couple of days. Mom, by all rights, should have been pleading for somebody to put aloe on her but she didn’t. She never complained. For an entire week, I tried to avoid the staff at her assisted living facility because I was mortified that I had let that happen to her. She wouldn’t let me apply aloe. She said she was “just pink.” More like magenta. I was cringing and Mom just wanted to go back to the beach.
I must have packed 10 bottles of sunscreen for the cruise. It was the first cruise we’ve been on since mom’s Alzheimer’s became so pronounced. Mom was next door to us, rooming with my daughter-in-law and 15-year-old granddaughter, and I gave them half the sunscreen for their room. They promised to make mom sunscreen up before leaving the ship every day. I carried more in my bag and took on the job of re-applying it. My mother bitched at us every time we made her put on sunscreen for the entire trip. Like a little kid does, standing there with a salty look while mom coats them up at the beach. It got to be a joke. If she’d gotten fried again, it wouldn’t have been funny, so I determined it was worth the arguments. By the end of the week, I realized we were travelling with two teenagers – my mom and my granddaughter. And my granddaughter is far-better behaved and more mature.
Parenting your parents sucks. All of my friends have crossed into that zone. Some are really lucky and their parents are in great shape. Most have to struggle with their parents either losing their health or losing their marbles. My mom is in great physical shape. Nuff said. Sometimes, I think I’m struggling more with Alzheimer’s than she is – not really, I can’t even imagine losing my mind that way and I pray it doesn’t happen to me. But I had a really hard time going from treating her like a best friend to treating her like a naughty toddler or sneaky tween. We’re still trying to figure out how she lost three hairbrushes on the cruise.
The cruise is its own blog, but I’ll do a spoiler here and tell you that we’re planning to take her on another, so it obviously wasn’t awful. I’ll call it a good learning experience. Mom had a great time and can’t wait to go again. I learned a lot that will make it more fun for me next time. But that’s another blog.
Now I must get back to work on the audiobooks so I can get in some beach time this weekend! What are you reading on the beach? It’s time to get caught up on the Gem of the Golden Isles Series before Book 5 is released. And I think I came up with the title last night.
The picture above is a couple of years old and I don’t look great in it but my mom does so I’m sharing it. We look a lot alike. I’m at the point where I pass a mirror and do a doubletake because I saw my mom. Yikes.
Have a great summer everybody. I promise to post again soon.
Until next time, happy reading!
Sandy