My Mother is gone. But his digital voice helps me keep fit

One afternoon, a a couple of months before my mother died of colon cancer, I piled on her bed to join her and my aunt, who were next to each other, playing between my two 8-month-old daughters. I pulled out the phone to record that they were both talking.

“What do you remember when you grew up?” I asked. The two sisters looked sideways and began to make fun of him. They laughed and told me that my mother was usually well drunk when she came home drunk when she was a good teenager, and when she was very overwhelmed, she needed her aunt’s help without waking up at home. parents and other siblings. The story was light and funny, and heard before, but I hung the secret of life in every word as if it were being decoded before my eyes. At this moment of laughter and ease it was fortunately easy to forget that there was a deadly disease in bed with us. For three years this recording remained untouched on my phone, the anchor to call when I needed to be ready.

This January, in the 10-month shelter and one year after giving birth to my second son, I decided to hire a nutritionist. I need help. I love sugar, which raises A1C levels to pre-Diabetic levels. Even when I’m at home I like to be late to enjoy all the podcasts, movies, and TV series that I don’t get into my day. My twin loves don’t love me again, and I realize that feeling tired and cloudy in the mornings is the complete opposite of treating myself.

One of the first things Peta-Gaye Williams, my new nutritionist, promised me was to arrange meals and bedtime on my phone. I learn about sleeping and eating chicken and eggs: bad sleeping habits feed food choices, and food choices help with sleeping habits. “Setting alarms for meals and sleep is like making appointments with yourself,” Williams tells me. I began to follow these instructions fully, somewhat skeptically, as I had never given myself much responsibility. To find the alarm tone I would use through my apps, I came across a file from my mother and aunt telling the story of a drunk night. This recording has been untouched on my phone for three years, and I feel a jolt that I can include it in my schedule instead of an alarm when I realize it’s time for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime.

Two months after I started this practice, this recording still caught my eye. I will change my desk or diaper or work in the bathroom when I hear my mother and aunt laughing in some corner of the house. I find my phone following their voices, listening to the fire and as I unfold the story I like to unite from my mouth. When I find the phone, when I feel like it has a great vibration in the palm of my hand, I go to the fridge and make meals or go to bed at my predetermined time, which is apparently not so ridiculous because I see him asleep putting his head on his pillow and a few minutes.

When the breakfast alarm goes off, the story begins: “And you called me and I had to let you in …” my aunt tells her mother to sit at the kitchen table and eat spinach and eggs. At lunch, they get to the point of the story that the mother tells her aunt to put a finger down her throat because she is drunk to do the same. When I eat greens and a piece of fish I hear the laughter in my stomach. When they get to dinner, mom and aunt are having a discussion about the details of what happened next. “No, mom and dad never know.” “Yes, they did.” When the night alarms order me to go to bed, the story is gone and my mother and aunt are debating whether or not my daughter needs some water. This recording is like a song of the lyrics I’ve learned about now, keeping time throughout my day.