Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

My parents are in Orlando this week. Dad is busy with business meetings and presentations, but Mom wanted to use up some vacation time, so she convinced my Aunt to tag along “for some fun.”

There’s a lot to do in Orlando, I hear. I’ve never been there, but without even calling on my higher mental functioning I could tell you that most of what there is to do in Orlando involves walking. Lots of walking.

Without getting into details, it’s easy to say that my family is not in any way health conscious. Certain siblings were blessed with higher metabolisms than others, but they do not seem to share those genes with my parents. Both are overweight, and my mother is quite obese.

I don’t have the energy to get into it tonight, but my father completely enables her: she never has to exert herself more than to climb the stairs to her room, hoist into bed, and watch Law and Order reruns from her cozy cushions. Sometimes she also lifts big boxes of cookies or cakes into a shopping cart, but dad and my brothers hoist them out and into storage when she gets home.

Mom suffers from major depression. Not that I’m an expert in mental health or anything¹, but a daily walk would really go far in alleviating her symptoms without taking so much medication. Still, she won’t do it. She’ll only think about it, talk about it, and give reasons why she can’t do it.

Mom has been blessed to see the world, thanks to my dad’s travel bug and an accommodating profession. The thing that amazes me is that, no matter where she is, my mom is surprised by the way her body protests against the rigors of travel. One day of walking lands her in bed for the next 2 days. She complains and exclaims of her feet, knees, hips, and other assorted body parts aching after sight-seeing. She does nothing to prepare herself, physically, for travel, and sometimes it’s easy for me to lose patience with it all.

Tonight she told me that she and my aunt had rented scooters to maneuver through the Magical Kingdom. I was hit with a wave of sadness. I want to escape my genetic heritage so badly.

1. I am. [↩]