How I Ever Survived Without An Automatic Bed, I'll Never Know

I spent my 2007 Christmas at my mom's house (in the 'burbs) this year. As expected, my parents drank too heavily and were unable to perform my much needed PCA duties on Christmas Eve. I was needless to say totally annoyed and promised myself after that night that I'll never again sleep over at my mom's, barring any Nuclear Holocaust or any other kind of "fleeing to your mom's" event. It was just absolutely wretched.

Let me paint for you a picture of how everything went down: All the family left our house at around 9:30pm. Then we busied ourselves with clean-up duty. And let me tell you there were A LOT of dishes to be washed. Not an easy task for a drunk woman of 49 years old to be performing. My mom was almost on the floor. And after my inner-family left, after all the cleaning-up was finished, I took one look at my mom (as she struggled to sit upright on an island stool) and knew an alternative method for getting into bed that night be required. Talk about too much stress to have to deal with on the Holidays. So not fair! What I should've done was had one of my PCA's drive out to my mom's and help, but by that time it was 11pm on Christmas Eve. Too late to ask any of them. Was I going to have to sleep hunched over on the bathroom sink again?

And then somehow, as if Jesus himself heard my distress call, my 22 year old sister called mom, seeing how the prime rib dinner was (she had to miss it and go to her boyfriend's family's house instead). I quickly snagged the phone out of her inebriated hands, and asked if she could come over and help. And she said yes. Whew! Christmas crisis averted. Within the half hour she was at the house helping me transfer into bed. And afterwards, as I tried to sleep during that night, I realized I was facing another crisis: I couldn't cath myself in this regular bed (i.e. it wasn't automatic and therefore couldn't sit me up). "Why hadn't I thought of this?!" my mind screamed to itself. So, at 4am I had to call my mom on my cell to wake her up, to see if she was sober enough to help me. Lucky for me she was.

I think next year I'll nix drinking any booze so I can drive home on Christmas Eve and cozy-up in my full-sized automatic bed with my neck warmer, my DVD player, and my two cats. Sometimes the comfort card trumps any long-lasting family Holiday nostalgia.