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Blogs by Edeltraud F. Fellendorf
"NAZI MENTALITY"? 1/9/2010 6:28:21 AM
By Cindy Rodriguez, Commander, U.S. Navy (ret.) Mom now expects me to read the blogs to her before I post them. Nevertheless, I think it's time to go off road again and reveal things about her that she would kill me for posting.
Mom was not brought up to be ashamed of her body. Most of us are quite different, and tend to closet ourselves away behind clothing. Mom has no qualms walking around butt naked after a shower. She doesn't care if I'm there. I'm used to it, but a part of me still cringes. Granted she only does this around my sister and me, but it's not something normally done in America that I'm aware of.
On the other hand, she is quite prideful and will not step outside or let anyone other than family see her without a bra. This point is best demonstrated by an occurrence in Miami.
Mom was visiting me there when the doorbell rang early one morning. I was at work. She answered the door and it was a UPS package that had been sent to the wrong address. Unfortunately for Mom, she accidentally closed the door and locked herself out. She went around the side of the house to see if my fence gate was open, but it was locked. The only way back into the house would be through the back because she left the sliding glass door ajar so the dogs could go out.
(Thinking back, it's strange to think that a package delivered to the wrong address would trigger such a cascade of events).
A normal person would have knocked on a neighbor's door, but because she had no bra on, that wasn't an option. Mom then did something incredibly dangerous and something that falls into my very stupid category. She used the huge metal ladder my neighbor left outside to take down his second story hurricane shutters to climb my 6 ft wooden privacy fence.
I know, so what? She climbed a fence - big deal! Well, Mom was 76-years-old, and had never worked out a day in her life! I have no idea how she managed to lift that heavy ladder.
It took her almost two hours in 80 degree weather, but she slowly climbed each rung, rested, and moved forward a little more. She then precariously balanced her 20x20 rump on a 4x4 fence post before letting herself jump onto my air conditioning unit that butted up against my fence on the other side. When she called me at work to tell me what she'd done, I almost fainted. I chewed her out in a major way, and thanked God nothing had happened to her. Can you imagine your elderly Mother doing that??
A week later, I had to call 911 for the first time in my life. Mom didn't get through her fence ordeal unscathed after all. She was admitted to the hospital and had to have surgery because she had fractured a vertebra. She fractured three more late last year, and we almost lost her.
Dad said it was her "Nazi mentality" that made her do it. While Mom was trained under Hitler's Nazi regime in Berlin, she was never a Nazi. Dad is an expert at pushing her buttons. Because of her background though, I myself often wonder about that comment.
