Kaylee and Colleen were painting a shoebox today to use for a Valentine box. I told them to please be careful with their clothes, because even though they were using washable paint, sometimes that stuff still doesn’t come out. Which started an argument about who should be MORE careful because they have more white on their shirt, and therefore more capacity for paint mishaps.

Finally, I couldn’t take it any more. “Just paint! There is no need to argue!”

Kaylee looked at me, confused. “But Mom, we can paint WHILE we argue.”

Seriously, they better be back in school tomorrow.

I am a sudoku snob. For the un-addicted, sudoku is a logic puzzle where you have to place the numbers 1 through 9 once and only once in each column, row and square on the board. I have done these puzzles for so long that I only do the puzzles that are 5 out of 5 or 6 out of 6 on the difficulty level.

The other week in the Post I found a 6-star sudoku I couldn’t wait to get my hands on. At first it seemed too easy; all the numbers were just falling into place. Until I hit a block. Really, I just needed one more number to set the dominos falling, but I just couldn’t get it. Now this happens every so often, there are puzzles I simply can’t solve. But it bugs the CRAP out of me. So after a couple days of my sulking and complaining about my lack of brain power, Mike calmly askd,

“Would you like me to get you the towel of shame? Or would you rather punch yourself in the head?”

Ouch. Tommy, my apologies for screwing you up so soundly.

My uncle, my dad’s younger brother, is physically and mentally handicapped and has been since birth. Though he is nearly 11 years my senior, he has the mental capacity roughly of a first-grader.

My grandma (Gram, to me) once told me that the doctors told her it would be better to institutionalize him as he likely would never walk, talk or do the things that other “normal” kids did. My sweet, demure, ladylike Catholic grandma, told the doctors to go to hell.

Thus began a battle she waged until the day she died. She fought to help him walk, and he eventually competed in the Special Olympics. She fought to help him learn, and he earned a high school diploma. She fought to give him the experiences that other kids had and so he rode a bike, took swim lessons, passed the written portion of his driver’s test and started training for a job. For a time, he had a girlfriend and he kissed her. It looked for a time that he may be able to live semi-independently.

But in my uncle’s life, it has always been one step forward, three steps back. When I was starting college, he was hospitalized with a blood clot. He later needed a heart valve replacement, then another. Soon, the young man who would ride his bike for hours and swim the width of an Olympic-sized pool underwater without surfacing could not walk from the kitchen to his bedroom.

And still Gram fought. She fought doctors, hospitals, social service program workers, nurses aids and any and all other comers. Her son deserved to be treated with care and respect and she would fight to be sure he got it. The worst was dealing with the agencies that were supposed to help. She would get letters saying that his physical therapy was discontinued, his Social Security benefits had difficulties, or the nursing agency was running low on staff and couldn’t send someone when it was supposed to.

More than once she would call me and sob into the phone, “Dogs at the pound are treated better than he is. I don’t expect them to love him like I do, but he is a person. All I want them to do is treat him like a person.”

She wouldn’t cry long. Self-pity was never her style. She would get it out, square her shoulders and fight on. She fought my uncle, prodding him to walk and do physical therapy. She fought her husband, whom she adored, if she didn’t think he was managing something related to my uncle’s care properly. She fought, even as she was dying of cancer. She would sit in the recliner my dad bought her and remind my uncle, who is essentially bed-ridden, to do his exercises and mind his manners.

She fought and fought and fought and then she died.

My grandpa has now undertaken the fight. He has managed, though he is partially blind and approaching 89 years old, to keep my uncle in his home and to keep things running smoothly. He knows it is what Gram wanted and what she always fought for.

Grandpa received a letter recently from the Social Security Administration. The letter alleges that the SSA overpaid my uncle’s benefits 23 years ago to the tune of nearly $1800 and they would now like their money back. There is another matter from over 20 years ago that needs attention as well. Though my uncle is bed-ridden, with the mind of a child and unable to engage in the most basic of self-care, someone, somewhere thinks it is a good idea to pursue him for reimbursement. The notion would be laughable were it not so tragic.

I told grandpa to send me the letters and that I will deal with the benefits morass. I have done it a few times before when Gram needed the help and while this is not my area of expertise, I have inherited a fair amount of her tenacity and hard-headedness. I am a working mom of two, with more on my plate than I know what to do with, but I will take this on and keep banging my head against the walls of bureaucracy until I dent them. I will fight. I will insist that they treat my uncle fairly, that they see him as someone’s child, a person. I will fight and when I am tired or frustrated or just not in the mood to deal with it, I will think of Gram.

And then I will go another round.

Today I had lunch with a group of mothers from Reid’s preschool class. Our kids were safely corralled behind glass in the Chick-Fil-A play area, tearing around, ripping off each other’s socks and fighting about whether the airplane was “only for boys.” We sat at the table and watched them idly, talking about the stuff moms talk about: soccer, piano lessons, bedtimes, the boundaries for the new elementary school, sibling rivalry issues, how much water to mix in with juice, the new phone App that gives you the wait times for all the rides at Walt Disney World.

Then one mom started telling us about a problem she had recently with her older daughter, a first grader. The girl had a friend over to play, a six-year-old neighbor boy who is the middle son in a family with three boys. (Three boys – always a red flag.) The boy came over to this mom and said that her daughter kept trying to “hump” him. He said, “Can you make her stop? She always wants to hump me.”

The mom was asking what we would have done in that situation. I suggested that, of course, this boy didn’t know what he was saying. I said he’d probably heard the word somewhere and was misusing it. She said, nope, she asked him and he said, “It’s what people who like each other do.” I said, well, he still doesn’t know exactly what he means. She said, nope again, he also told her, “Dogs and cats do it too.”

At this point I agreed that maybe he had an inkling of what he was saying, but I wondered aloud where a six year old would have heard that particular word. She replied, “The parents.” I said that was impossible. “Not with these parents,” she replied. “After all, they named their sons after kinds of beer.”

Yes, the three sons are named Guiness, Foster and Colt. Which is really horrifying, but also kind of impressive. I mean, you have to admire the way they chose a lifestyle and really stuck to it.

It’s also kind of useful. I mean, just hearing those three names, there is a 99% chance I can perfectly describe the father’s hairstyle, sight unseen.