I’ve been having a battle with my head for the past 4 weeks, or a battle in my head, I’m never quite sure. I have a chronic health problem called Meniere’s Disease - an inner ear problem that causes severe dizziness for me from time to time.

I have lived with, and dealt with, this “inconvenience” for almost 20 years - some good and some bad years. However, in past years I had managed to control my dizziness through medication, diet and just paying more attention to how I do things. This year has not been so good, and seems to keep going downhill!

My daily activities have been dramatically altered over the past month, as I am fighting some definite physical changes which are effecting my inner ears. My days are more often spent reclining on the bed or couch, holding my head as perfectly still as I can, than at my desk where I should be doing work!

The Drs are challenged to find a combination of things that might work - so I have been at the “let’s try this for a week or two” stage for a while now, with not much appreciable change.

But the real reason for this post is to say thanks to my mother. My mother, like most mothers including me, wait for their kids to call them occasionally to tell them they are okay and doing well. My boys all live away from me, and I like to know that occasionally they think of me and want to give me a call.

My mother is also like most mothers, including me, that start to assume when they don’t hear from their children for a while that they have “become too busy for me.”   So when I called my mother on a good morning, just to say hello and pass belated birthday greetings to my Dad, for some reason I started to cry half-way through the conversation.

Now, speaking as a mother myself, there is nothing more painful than to hear your child crying on the other end of a phone line that is hundreds of miles away. You are totally helpless to do anything, even put your arms around your child to comfort them.

So, I generally try not to do that with my mother, because I know how hard it is. But that day, I had become so frustrated with how my physical life had been going that I just broke down. She, of course, like mothers really always do, became immediately sympathetic to my plight and felt so sorry that she couldn’t come to my rescue.

Needless to say, I’m learning to live only for today - really, only for today - and make very few plans ahead right now. I will plan to check in with my mother more often, because now I know she is worried about me.  Maybe you should check with your mother too!