more hard parts

I couldn't have picked more perfectly uncomfortable radio program topics if I'd been sitting at a table writing this morning with a team of gifted screenwriters instead of living it. As it happens, I was living it and not writing it, though I wish it could have been the other way around.
On the way to my mother's appointment with the orthopedic surgeon, Diane Rhem interviewed two men about the new pope's views on abortion and family planning and poverty. We drove in silence, each pretending to ignore the broadcast, each pretending that she wasn't judging me and that I, in turn, wasn't angry with her for that judgement. As if she has any idea of what it was like...
She spent the hour or so at the doctor's office being impossibly chipper, cracking jokes and insisting that I could leave if I wanted to. I maintained civility. I'm not ready to be her friend yet, not without some sort of coming to terms with the past year and half.
We waited at the check out counter. She nervously eyed an elderly couple, leaned toward me and whispered loudly, "I don't want to get old."
"I don't know what to tell you." All I could think was how much I hope that I can get old, and how old she is in spite of her age.
At our next stop, she lost patience with my inability to play at being friends and yelled at me as I tried to help her into the store.
She came out--stubbornly pulling herself along with one functional foot, three bottles of wine in plastic bags on her lap, crutches held awkwardly at her side--and ignored me when I tried to help her into the car.
On our way back to the apartment, Terry Gross interviewed the makers of a new television series about adults with elderly parents receiving palliative care. They talked about the burden and the privilege of being there for the awful time our loved ones spend in the hospital. about being advocates and caretakers. about love.
And while she stared out the window brooding, I snapped.
I told her that she didn't get to punish me for having a hard time with this. I reminded her that she had lied to me and said she was dying, that she had been vicious while I was sick and scared for my life, that she had concocted strange stories about me and Jason as though I might somehow come to believe a fiction about my own actions. "But I'm here," I said, "taking you where you need to go and walking your dogs, and I'll keep doing it, but you do not get to demand that I not feel what I'm feeling." She turned back to the window, silent. I cried.
Wordlessly, she refused my help out of the car or up the stairs where she slammed the door in my face.
It's hard to know what to do next, if anything.
Cue Lynn Rosetto Kasper's explanation of the best holiday recipes for eating away your guilt and sorrow.


 

bright spots and dark spots

I haven't used the space to write about my mother. I think because, on some level, her big-brotheresque stories about being able to constantly monitor me still linger in the back of my mind and I think she'll find it. I don't think I've got any readers who don't know me, and if you know me, you probably know that she and I have a horrible relationship. You probably also know that we haven't actually spoken to each other in over a hear. I use that term, "speaking," fairly liberally, because since I told her that I wouldn't talk to her until she stopped screaming at me (for not appropriately assuaging her fears that I might die while I was dealing with my diagnosis and subsequent surgery and adjuvant therapy planning), she hasn't actually spoken words to me, but has screamed via text message about how she's dying (not true) and how I am a terrible person for abandoning her.
Sometimes I think she's right. Most of the time I appreciate the quiet weeks in between the texts.
She is not well. I know that. But I couldn't keep letting that be my primary concern in life once I ran into something so large that it took all of my focus and strength. I needed to take care of myself before I could take care of her.
A week ago she broke her ankle.
I picked her up from the hospital and took her home and have been stopping by every day to walk her dogs.
It's awful.
At first she was terse, resentful of needing my help, I'm sure. She's moved on to pretending that nothing is wrong, ignoring me or playing dumb or tossing out trump cards when I indicate that I, too, know what it's like to be incapacitated by surgery. To feel frustrated and gloomy and scared. To be in pain that seems like it might never end. To be dependent.
She wasn't there for me in those days. Indeed, two days after getting home from two surgeries and a week in the hospital, she picked a fight with me that led to the ensuing year and half of (relative) silence. 
So she pretends that those days never existed, or that if they did, I am just melodramatic, exaggerating for pity, which lets her be the bigger victim.
And I keep going over there. Keep biting my tongue. Keep not screaming at her for accusing me of shaving my head after finishing chemo to garner more sympathy. And not confronting her about how she lied and told me she had lung cancer, or about how she tried to make me think that Jason was cheating on me.
And I spend a little part of each day feeling like I might explode. And I don't know what to do.
I keep thinking that there ought to be a point when shit stops piling up. I can't be the case that all of my life will be this perpetual onslaught of disasters, right? But it doesn't ever seem to stop and I'm just so fucking tired.
I suppose in these dark moments, it is easy to overlook the bright ones that come in between, and there certainly are bright spots.

sweet relief

This thing I've been waiting for for over a year finally happened. It happened and I didn't even notice, but I suppose that's exactly how monumental events of this variety ought to happen.
I went the entire day--from the time I got up and get dressed, through my work day of moving around and crouching and huddling with students over their writing, of putting on taking off my jacket, until I got home and had made dinner--without thinking about my breasts. At no point did I have to try to discretely adjust my prosthesis, pull my scarf lower, my sweater tighter, or my collar higher to hide the awkward, abrupt protrusion that housed the hard, bulbous tissue expander. When I used the bathroom I didn't bother looking at my chest to see if the prosthesis was lopsided or if my bra was fitted weirdly over the expander (where I lack sensation). No stretch was interrupted with the genuine fear that I'd disordered my cumbersome, temporary breasts. The expander didn't push into my bicep, nudging uncomfortably to remind me of its presence.
I just got up and went to work and did regular people things, and thought about regular people things, without being distracted by feeling like a very irregular person. I haven't done that in a very long time.