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.