Your mother’s last resort isn’t a nursing home, Bettie. It’s not an assisted living facility with bingo nights and pudding cups. It’s not moving in with you and your husband (bless his heart, but he uses my good scissors on cardboard). No. The last resort is this:
Now call your mother.
That’s when I realized: the house wasn’t a home anymore. It was a mausoleum with a mortgage. bettie bondage this is your mothers last resort portable
Last month, a woman named Jean from Tulsa taught me how to change a tire. A month before that, a retired librarian from Vermont gave me her leftover prescription muscle relaxers when my sciatica flared up. We are not tragic. We are not homeless. We are home-full , but our home moves. Bettie, this is your mother’s last resort. I need you to hear me: I am not doing this to hurt you. I’m doing this because the alternative was sitting in that blue house, watching the mail come, waiting for a phone call that wouldn’t come because your father is dead and you have your own life.
It’s a resort . It’s just portable. So, Bettie, here we are. You’ve read this far, which means either you love me or you’re hate-reading. Either way, I win. Your mother’s last resort isn’t a nursing home, Bettie
I have a “Portable Panic Playlist” on Spotify. It’s 47 songs long. It includes ABBA, Johnny Cash, Lizzo, and an inexplicable amount of 80s power ballads. When the loneliness hits—and it does, Bettie, it does—I put on headphones and let “Total Eclipse of the Heart” drown out the silence. You think I’m alone out here. I’m not. There’s a whole subculture of women over sixty in vans, RVs, and converted buses. We call ourselves the “Solo Silver Caravan.” We meet at campgrounds. We share meals. We fix each other’s solar wiring. We have a group chat on Signal where we share safe parking spots and the best BLTs in Nevada.
Because that’s the thing about a portable lifestyle and entertainment, honey. You don’t leave the people you love. You just find new ways to carry them with you. It was a mausoleum with a mortgage
By Margaret “Mags” Hollingsworth