Smiling while sitting on the hospital bed we rented and placed in her sunroom for the last month of her life, is my mother Paulina, showing off a new hair cut. I had driven her out to the hair dresser's, forty minutes away from Mom's double-width trailer in a gated retirement enclave near the summer resort town of Grand Bend, Ontario. 

Mom made a day of it, as she always did, relishing in the simple pleasure of someone washing her hair and fussing over her and the everyday chit chat with the hair dresser. During the car ride there, she commented again on my horrible driving, and how I should sit up straighter, and how I chewed gum too loudly, and how I was too stubborn for my own good. This also gave her pleasure as it did me, strangely. It was that familiar pang of irritation I felt—we had had the same conversation for decades—that comforted me. In the midst of so much change and the topsy-turvy-ness of me now being the caregiver and her the helpless charge, she was still my mom. She still knew what was best for me. And she could still piss me off.

Mom died in 2018 before the pandemic (thank God). And I've been trying to write about her ever since, but failing miserably. How do I begin? Where do I start? How do you capture an entire, complicated person on the page? All I have written so far are bits and pieces: drabbles (100-word stories), poems, and thinly fictionalized versions of her in first chapters of ambitious, but never to be realized, novels. So I've decided to string all these bits in some sort of order to see if they fit together. You and I, dear reader, can then begin to build a picture of her and perhaps come to some conclusions about who Paulina was (and still is) to all those who knew, loved and were occasionally irritated by her.

I have chosen to focus mostly on my relationship with Paulina, but that is not to say the  relationships she had with my siblings, her daughter- and sons-in-law, her husbands and lovers, her friends and grandchildren were any less important. And I do not want to leave the impression that I was my mom's sole caregiver. My older sister, Lianne, did more than her fair share of caregiving during the last two years of Mom's life. 

So what's in it for you? Will this be a good read? Did Paulina live a fascinating life? On the surface, probably not. But underneath? Tragic deaths, foster homes, poverty, adultery, bigamy, perseverance, re-invention, imagination, passion, hoarding, and a great deal of stubbornness. Well, I got it from somewhere, didn't I?

And shopping. Did I mention shopping? There will be lots of shopping.