My Mother, etc. - 6/13/2007 in 2005 - 2007: High School

My father and I go to visit my mother every day, for twenty minutes, maybe. She is alright now. Just old. She's just like a normal old person who can't walk around very well and has to ask other people to get her stuff. Her hair has turned almost completely white, and her voice just never stopped being shaky. She's also gotten pretty crotchety. It should have occured to me before that she wouldn't make a very good old person. She's a control freak, and the more helpless she gets, the more she'll deny it and the more she'll try to compensate for it be being crotchety. The visits are alright. I guess it's nice to have three people in the family for twenty minutes a day. Some visits are better than others. Sometimes it is the way the dinner table was before, and we talk about random shit and laugh. Sometimes though, I have nothing to say to my mother and it's dark and the room smells the way that all hospital and nursing home rooms do, and I just want to leave.

She's coming home tomorrow. I wish she wouldn't. My father - and everyone else, actually - keeps saying that I must be under a lot of stress with her gone - that it must be hard for me. I have searched every corner of my brain for a way in which it is hard for me not to have my mother at home. And I can't find anything. When I think about it, when I try to guilt myself into missing her, I always have to admit that I like life a lot better with just my father. He doesn't tell me what to do all the time, and he doesn't constantly seem like he's judging me, and he leaves me alone. And... Well, I guess he doesn't always treat me like an adult, but he's at least inexperienced enough as a parent that I can get away with acting like one. And my mom doesn't treat me any way that I want to be treated, and I can't act any way that I want to act. She treats me... like a student, actually. I hate that we don't even argue. I wish I could argue with her.

I do not want her to come home. My father and I are doing fine. We sit down every few days and write up a grocery list, and then I go buy the stuff on it, and he goes to work and we eat dinner together. And then he leaves me alone. That's all we need. We can keep doing that.

Apparently she is going to smell bad and get shit on stuff a lot.

It's only two months now, I guess.

I haven't gotten a response to that email yet. And at this point I'm assuming that there won't be one. It's hard to believe. I've been thinking about it a lot. I basically haven't been able to stop thinking about it. And I guess that it was sort of a lose lose situation, but I've decided that I don't regret saying what I said. I think it was the right thing to do, to the extent that there was a right thing to do. It's just hard to believe that I'll never go over to her house again. I'll never see her cat or her sister again and I'll never smell that smell that the house has. I'll never see the flowers in her back yard. And I'll probably never see her again either. Or I'll see her six months from now at the Thanksgiving game, like I said. I think I would have prefered an angry response to no response. It's like she's just gone.

She was my best friend.

It's hard to believe.