Me in response to my siblings telling me what Mom wanted to eat for the Super Bowl: She will be getting a small hoagie, a small French bread pizza slice, some buffalo chicken bites, loaded potato skins, potato chips, chips and salsa, and Diet Dr. Pepper. I’m running a geriatric Super Bowl party not a restaurant. She doesn’t get to choose.
I’m a red-blooded American. This means that even though I don’t actually care about football, I watch the Super Bowl. Most years I make some traditional Super Sunday foods, like wings and nachos, and then we watch it as a family. Once in a while we’d attend a party, but with neither my husband nor I liking loud parties, we typically turn down all invites. This year my husband decided he wanted to attend, and as much as I don’t like the crowds, I hate being left out more. I’d already committed to stay home with Mom so my husband RSVP’d for one less, and I sulked on the inside.
Mom had been home and bed bound for several weeks leading up to the big event. Mom, unlike me, was a football fan. To be more specific, Mom was an die hard Eagles fan. I tried to make the day special in part for her, but to be honest, I was thinking mostly of myself. I was suffering from a severe case of FOMO and a healthy bout of self-pity. So, I bought some appetizers (mozzarella sticks, loaded baked potato skins, pigs-in-a-blanket), hoagies, chips, and soda. I brought over my schoolwork and laptop and set myself up in Mom’s full size bed, situated adjacent to her hospital bed/football watching sation. I turned on the oven and started cooking some simple party fare.
Mom wasn’t hungry.
Fine, more for me.
As kick off approached, Mom turned on the game and that’s when it hit me. Mom doesn’t have a large flat screen TV. She has a miniscule screen. With the TV facing directly towards Mom, and from my angle and distance, I could barely read the score. With the lesson plans and grading I was doing, I couldn’t even follow the score. I began to cry silent tears. I was in full-blown pity party mode, complete with snacks. Snacks which I was eating alone because the only other person at my party “wasn’t hungry.” It wasn’t that I really wanted to be at a party, I just didn’t want my life to be put on hold to care for my mom. I didn’t want to be stuck changing diapers when I could be doing something else, anything else. I was selfish. I knew I was selfish. I was ashamed of my selfishness. And I can assure you, misery really does love company.
Mom and I chatted that night, and not everything was the tragedy I had played out in my head. Except for the buffalo chicken bites. They were more putrid than the diapers I was changing. (Pro tip: Spend the money to buy real wings from a real wings joint. If you can’t have a nice party, at least you can have well earned heartburn.) Surprisingly, Mom enjoyed the game. She didn’t know how much she was missing out on by not watching the game on a screen large enough to be able to read the numbers on the jerseys. She did express her disappointment that she wouldn’t live long enough to see her beloved Eagles win a Super Bowl even though she faithfully draped her t-shirt over her hospital-gowned chest every game that season. Like a good daughter, I assured her that even if she lived to be 100 she wasn’t going to get to see that, so she really wasn’t missing out on anything. I’m empathetic like that.
Truth be told, I knew that day that she wasn’t going to see another Super Bowl regardless of who was in it, and that alone almost made me an Eagles fan just for her. When the Eagles finally did make an appearance at the big game only a few years later, I would wear my green and white and wipe the buffalo sauce off my face with Eagles napkins I inherited from Mom. I sure hope heaven has a massive flat screen, and Mom had her front row seats to that game.