Community Post: The No-Laundry-on-Sunday Sabbath

It's a Friday afternoon. I wait for my mother’s arrival, and can only imagine how our lives are about to change.

Years-in-the-making rhythms of daily prayers, Scripture reading, and study—as well as weekly Sabbath worship and rest—are like breathing, eating, and morning coffee. It wouldn’t be life without them. But Sabbath practices are as unique and changing as my circumstances. These practices are soul anchors, with long ropes that stretch and adapt to fluctuations in my abilities and responsibilities.

But my soul-anchoring practices are drastically altered the moment my mother is wheeled through our front door on a stretcher.

Mother grimaces as the men who drove the medical transport van slide her onto the hospital bed in the middle of what used to be our master bedroom. Disabled and with dementia, Mother doesn’t say a word. She trembles, cold and afraid; and though I remind her, she’s confused about where she is and who I am. Her clothes are drenched with sweat and urine, and the drivers offer no explanation for what happened to the catheter she should have had when they picked her up at the rehab center hours earlier.

When the men leave, I fill the bathroom sink with warm water and remove her wet clothes. I give her a bath, dress her in clean clothes. The reality that I’m on my own sinks in. Any confidence I had that I could care for my mother as well or better than those who had been caring for her for weeks slowly evaporates as I wonder what can be done—late on a Friday afternoon—about her need for a catheter and the blistering bedsores I discover on both her heels.

Two days later, my family leaves for church without me. It's the first of many Sundays, field trips, sports and social events for which I’m left behind. Mother’s complicated care is my responsibility alone. My Sabbath disappears. So does any measure of leisure time I may have carved out of our family’s schedule, a schedule that includes homeschooling two teenage boys and their younger sister. Leisure time disappears in the feeding, changing, bathing, dressing and meeting of my mother’s complex needs.

Beginning with feeding her breakfast, my routine with Mother is the same every day. I give her a bath and dress her in clean clothes. Using a mechanical lift, I move her out of bed into a sheepskin-lined geriatric chair that I can move around the house and onto the porch. Before the morning is over, I make her bed with fresh linens. Every. Single. Day. With massages, diligent care, and good hydration and nutrition, her bedsores begin to heal. I’m not inclined to change a thing.