Groove® Pillow ad: I found a towel in my mom's pillowcase

When I changed the sheets on my mother's bed last month, I found a dish towel rolled up inside her pillowcase. She's 84. It was one of her blue-striped kitchen towels, rolled into a tight log and held at both ends with rubber bands off the morning paper. She'd pushed it down along the bottom seam of her pillowcase, right where her neck would go. Mom came in with an armful of clean washcloths and stopped in the doorway. She got that chin-up look she gets whenever she thinks my sister Karen and I are about to fuss over her. "Leave that there, Ellen," she said. "I use that." When I asked her why, she smoothed the quilt and said, "Your father's physical therapist told him to do that years ago. It helps a little." Then she went to start lunch. My mother has lived alone in the house I grew up in since Dad died nine years ago. She still drives herself to church, she still does the crossword in pen, and she does not complain. Ever. If you ask her how she slept, she says, "Oh, fine." What she doesn't say to me, though she once told my sister, is that she's up two or three times a night. And most mornings she turns her whole body at the counter to look at the clock on the stove instead of just turning her head. I'd noticed it. I just hadn't thought about it. Her pillows are the same two she's had as long as I can remember, worn thin as dish rags. She sleeps on her left side with the second one folded under the first, and now, apparently, the towel to fill in the gap. Driving home that afternoon, I kept seeing those rubber bands. And I remembered something from the spring that I hadn't paid enough attention to at the time. I'm 58, and I'm a side sleeper too. A year ago my own mornings had started going the way hers do, a stiff neck most days and my hand going numb in the night. So I'd bought myself a new pillow, a strange-looking one. It took me about a week to get used to it, and after that I quit waking up with my neck stuck. In April Mom stayed with us for a long weekend while her furnace was being replaced. I put my own pillow on the guest bed for her and didn't explain anything. The only thing she said about it was, "That pillow of yours is firm." She went home on Monday and never mentioned it again, and neither did I. So she went back to her flat pillows. And at some point after that, to the towel. Why didn't I just buy her one in April? Because you don't buy my mother things. She raised four kids on a mailman's salary, and she still saves twist ties. If I'd just handed her one, she'd have thanked me, put it in the cedar chest, and gone right on making do. So this time I explained it first. The next Saturday I sat at her kitchen table with the towel between us. I told her what I'd figured out on my own. On your side, I said, your head is a whole shoulder's width off the mattress, so it needs a lot more under it than it does on your back. On a thin pillow your neck bends to make up the difference all night, and you end up lying on your own shoulder. That's what her folded pillow and the towel were trying to do. The trouble is, a towel unrolls and a folded pillow goes flat. And when you roll onto your back, the whole stack is too tall. Mom listened, which is rare. Then she said, "So I've been sleeping crooked." "For a while, Mom." The pillow I'd been sleeping on is called the Groove. I'd already ordered two more, and I brought one over so she could hold it. Here's the one, so you can see what I mean: https://www.groovepillows.com/products/original-groove-pillow I showed her the low part in the middle, where your head goes on your back, and the higher ends, where it goes on your side. Then I ran her finger along the curve cut into the front edge, where your shoulder tucks under. You use it by itself. No towel, no second pillow. She turned it over in her hands and said, "That's the hard one from your guest room." She also asked what it cost, which is how I knew she was considering it. They're two for $100. One was for her bed, and one was for my guest bed, so she'd sleep the same way when she comes to us for Christmas. That made it a gift for the house, which she could accept, instead of a gift for her, which she couldn't. At fifty dollars each, it was less than Karen and I usually spend on a holiday sweater she never wears. I was nervous. Some people just don't like these shaped pillows, and at 84 my mother doesn't like new things in general. But you get 100 nights from the day they arrive, and the company says to give it at least a week. If she hated them, I could send them back for my money and pay the shipping myself. That was worth finding out. Day three she called at eight in the morning to tell me it was "firm." I told her she'd promised me a week. Day nine she mentioned, in the middle of a story about the neighbor's dog, that she'd slept until seven. My mother has not slept until seven in my entire adult life. The next time I changed her sheets there was no towel in the pillowcase. It was washed, folded flat, and back in the kitchen drawer with the others. She's still 84. She still gets up once in the night, and she still says, "Oh, fine." But now she says it like she means it. Last Sunday at my niece's birthday party, I heard her tell Karen, "Your sister got me a pillow," the way you'd tell someone about a new car. Karen called me that night and asked where I got it. Christmas is coming, and you already know what your mother is going to say when you ask what she wants. Mine says "nothing, honey" every single year. If she's sleeping on a dish towel, she doesn't need another sweater. This is the one I got her. Two of them are $100, one for her bed and one for yours. https://www.groovepillows.com/products/original-groove-pillow Ellen P.S. Check her pillowcase the next time you change her sheets. I'd never have known about the towel if I hadn't.