Whinge

[smokingboot]

My mood is not good. Which is crazy really. It started with this message from my mother. I break it down into verse because it makes more sense that way:

I have seen your fruit trees
Do not eat these fruits
Have the soil analysed as you
Do not know what was there
Before the house was built
And since you got there
the cats have not been well
And neither are you.

Have you considered moving?

Trying to keep my temper I reminded her that of the four cats we had, one died at 16 and a half, of the remaining three, two are 16 going on 17, one is 20 going on 21, so they're doing all right. And yes, the two humans in the family have a history of respiratory difficulties so perhaps Scotland was not the best move if that's the only thing one takes into account. But I have been ill in other places too. I reminded her of the malignant melanoma I had in Manchester.

Apparently no, no, I never told her about that.

Except yes, yes I did, indeed she was the one who brought it up when I went to visit her all those years back. Sitting side by side, within the first few minutes of our conversation, she pointed to Sauron the molomancer and said; 'What is that?'
I had explained. She told me not to get it removed but to cover it up with a plaster. Had I listened, this journal would have ended over 10 years ago. Trouble with Mum is not that she lives in a fantasy world but that she makes the real world a more dangerous place.

Then she went through a phase of denying that there had ever been a mole there. This happens on and off. Right now she has decided there never was a mole, or I never told her about a mole, I never replied to her letters, and I should move.

I can easily enter the land of the unreal, the neverwhere, the borderlands, but my mother's signposts are vague at best, I'm in the Strange Place before I know it and I'm never ready. Then what she does is erase the reality of one's own experience, one's own life. You didn't contact me, yes I did, you didn't have cancer, yes I did, there was no mole on your arm, yes there was, it never happened, yes it did. I don't think it is changing or becoming Alzheimers adjacent, it's just the same old burned out schizophrenic pattern. I get frustrated, and then have to remember how how chronic this is, how none of this is within her agency to prevent. I get it. But it still hurts my head.

There are other issues, mainly around timings. In uncanny perversity, every bone scan appointment has clashed with cancer focused ones. Guess which get prioritised. So now the bone scan people are saying I get one more appointment, which cannot be rearranged, to attempt to do so means they withdraw the offer. Why? Do they think I am being naughty? I have yet to learn how long the radiotherapy is for or when it begins, but as I understand, the treatments have to be on consecutive days. So what do I do if those days coincide with the bone scan? Do I just forget the scan and guard against osteoporosis by eating my body weight in cheese? (Actually I quite like this plan.) R wants me to write and complain, I just want it to be easy, without people trying to penalise me for stuff I can't control! Oooh, world, do not join my mother, do not bend my brain!

Worst of all, right at the back of my head, where magical thinking thrives and I am still a little girl I think; could she be right? Crazy, deluded but right? Is there something about this place that makes us ill? Should we move?