“I’m going to make us some coffee.”

“That’s not how you do it!” she says, her voice raising a few octaves and with a sense of urgency.

Actually, it is how I do it. It’s how most people do it. It’s not how my mother does it.

And, as I’ve come to realize during my visit home — not the home of my youth, but the home my parents have made in South Florida — is that my mother does a lot of things in what can only be described as “how you do it,” aka the right way. And there can be no variation on the theme.

My mother, less than a month away from turning 80, has become rigid.

There are rules about timers, and appliance plugs, and napkins, and paper towels, and washing bowls and cutting a grapefruit and ... everything.

There are three containers of water on the counter; one with salvaged shower water for washing dishes (kudos to her for conserving), one OK for cooking and washing fruits and vegetables, one for drinking. There are three towels; one for wiping hands, one for wiping dishes, one for wiping food. There are dozens of sponges for who knows what.

The setup for any meal — whether a breakfast of a cup of coffee and a banana or a dinner of grapefruit and then fish, rice and vegetable — takes about 10 minutes with placemats in the proper spots and trays and …

I don’t recall her ever being like this. But once her health started failing and she needed several prescriptions, The Meds — two pills at 9 a.m., eye drops at 9 p.m. — started dictating the routine of her life.

And now, her life is routine.

“Mom,” I ask her, slightly frustrated, “why do you have to do it this way? You’ve become so rigid!”

“It makes my life easier.”

In a weird way, I understand. When we’re living with things that overwhelm us, we seek to control whatever small things we can. I became a little more rigid when my first son was born — “We can’t leave the house without changing his diaper first!” “We have to be home for his naptime!” And then I took on some odd behaviors when the realization hit that I was living with an alcoholic, not someone who liked to kick back a beer every now and then.

But I look at her — knowing the stereotype that people get more rigid when they age, although some recent studies on the elderly have debunked that — and I think, I don’t want to be like that!

What is the most immediate thing out of my mother’s control right now is my 85-year-old dad’s health — a sudden onset of seizures and then brain surgery and more surgeries to come. And that is why I flew across the country.

His life, her life, my whole family’s life has changed, and is likely to be very different from how it was from her on in.

Have you become more or less rigid as you're aged? In what ways?