Bleak

Of all the delicious things that have happened recently from the visit to the Grenadier near Hyde Park Corner to the fabulous exhibition of Ashurbanipal at the British Museum, I have to record a distressing thing. My mother is extremely high functioning but mentally ill. She has been mentally ill for most of her life and mine. She has cycles, highs, lows, times when there seems nothing wrong at all. These are so convincing, I forget. A problem of mine has always been that I am ready to accept the terms of someone else's reality very easily, possibly because I had to adapt to my mother's inner world shaping my outer world. Anyway, she is 80 late December,and I wanted to spend Christmas and her birthday with her. She has just sent me a letter telling me not to come, the letter has been registered, her writing is scrambled, her tone is different. The rationale is that everyone goes home to eat with their family on Xmas night so nothing will be open and she will not eat anywhere else or sleep anywhere else, so what will I do? Plus there will be no transport so how can I get anywhere?

The family reassure me that of course I can eat with them, but my mother will refuse to attend, and my intention was never to leave my mother alone in a flat without heating or food or light on Christmas night. She does not want me there. She is panicking. She asks me to reply to her and I fear that if I do not, or if I reply saying that I can't postpone the ticket and am coming anyway, I may cause her real distress far greater than her delight at seeing me.

But she might be out of what I can only conclude is a low point in her cycle by Christmas and then what? She sits there, sad and alone.

I don't know what to do. If I don't go, that's £300 for the hotel down the drain though I can get a refund on the air tickets. It doesn't seem like much, and money is only money, but still it's not throw about stuff at this juncture. It will mean I am unlikely to be able to come back early in January.

I hate her illness. I hate it so much that if it was a person I would just punch it repeatedly in the face. I get angry because there was, there must have been a time when, as a psychiatric nurse, she knew something was wrong, and she should have done something while she still knew what was happening. But in those days anti-psychotic drugs had very nasty side-effects. She was a proud and beautiful woman, and she probably couldn't bear the idea of shuffling around like a zombie with her teeth falling out and her mouth drooling lopsidedly. Couldn't bear to become like the patients she treated.

Ugh, no answers for me. I feel so frustrated and out of ideas, I have to stop writing right now.