Like I've said, Mother isn't perfect, but she can walk good now. I haven't seen her negotiate the stairs all that much, but while she takes it slow, she seems to not have an issue with walking up or down. The exercises she needs to concentrate on now have to do with adjusting the body while isolating her new knee and putting stresses on her joints (not just her new knee) -- standing up from a chair, high kicks on stairs, stuff like that.
I say this to say that she shouldn't have too much trouble now going up and down the stairs, and down the stairs is where the master bedroom and bathroom are. That's also where Father ends up after we have dinner. We all split up: Him to his bedroom, me to my bedroom, and Mother to her bedroom ... which is not the same bedroom as Father's. Anticipating that she would be incapacitated after knee surgery, they decided that they would turn my former bedroom back into a bedroom where Mother would sleep in as she recuperates. It's upstairs (we have a split-level) because that's where the kitchen and her sewing machine is. As long as she was confined to walking on one level, it had to be the one where she can eat and spend her hours at her hobbies.
So that was a few weeks ago. I assumed it would be temporary, that once she was able to walk up and down stairs without too much pain, she would rightfully move back in with Father in the master bedroom. No, that hasn't happened yet. The few times I checked up on her, she is in her bed (it's my bed frame; while this may have been the reason she took my bed, her knee surgery was used by My Fucking Parents as an excuse to toss all the stuff that was important to me, and now I'm getting all pissed the fuck off again, so I'll move on), her pillows arranged how she wants, watching her videos on her streaming box. She's happy as a clam in her own room. Moreover, my sister, when she was here, asked if she wanted to move back downstairs once my sister thought Mother could walk down the stairs without too much difficulty. Mother said no, at least for the time being, because she felt that she would make too much noise and wake Father up if and when she needed to get out of bed in the middle of the night and shuffle to the master bathroom to pee. Two things about that. Would that worry change now that she can walk instead of shuffle? And since she can walk, why wouldn't she move back downstairs and bug Father like usual when she does get up to pee? It's how they've been living all this time anyway, right?
So it's that second point I want to hone in on. I'm starting to get the feeling that Mother actually likes her own bedroom. Why wouldn't she? She has the whole room to herself so she can do whatever she wants. And I believe Father snores, and she likes that she doesn't have to hear him snoring. If she does enjoy sleeping alone, that probably means Father likes sleeping alone as well. He isn't getting woken up by Mother when she needs to pee, of course. The only worry Mother has is that Father, who is getting up there in age, won't have someone around him if he falls, Buddha forbid.
I would like Mother to move back down, not gonna lie. That way I can have the bathroom all to myself. I don't have to move around the bathmat in case she trips over it. I can also arrange my shampoo and toothbrush to where I want it. Finally, I want the upper part of the house to myself in case I don't want to put any clothes on if I need to get up from my bed and shuffle into the bathroom to pee. However, if this separate bedrooms thing is permanent, and if both parental units are going to be here for a while, this is a New Normal I really, really won't like.
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