The Pull Down

She can't help it.

The same day I got my musical gift, Mum sent me a generous gift of Euros via Western Union. I told her she didn't have to, I told her not to bother, but hey, she made the effort which is a lovely thing to do.

And then she freaked out about it so much, I went to collect it as quickly as possible. She sent me a photo of the number I needed; the photo was fuzzy so I asked her to confirm the numbers, her confirmation was wrong, because these things happen. It was easily sorted. But she started to get anxious and confused, and this meant text mis-spellings that got out of hand, and there we were.

'Someone is hacking my phone.' She decided.

'Why?' I was feeling short of patience. 'Why would they bother?'

'I think someone has a sense of humour,' she said, dourly.

Oh yes, someone really gets off on making your phone type lll aaaaa nnnnnnnn I wanted to say. Instead I got home and read out to her lots of people's complaints about their phone algorithms, predictive texting, auto-correct. I lightened the whole thing up for her, which is good. But a part of me, the part that hates her disease, is just tired of how every little thing that happens is because Someone Is Doing It To Her. There are and never have been any accidents, not for us. I hate the way it takes the most minor occurrence for a normal conversation to become this creeping awful thing about Someone. I wanted to spend the day feeling high as a kite about the kind things Wille said, not smoothing out the ripples in her brain, ripples that never entirely go away and never will.

And today I feel weighed down, like I can't think of anything chirpy to say to her.

The big thing is this; next year all being right with vaccines etc R is going to be able to take a nice chunk of time off and would like us to spend it touring Cambodia and Vietnam at Christmas/New Year. I am up for this provided we can find a cat/house sitter, possibly not as easy as it sounds given the time of year. Come Winter, mum doesn't go out much and she certainly wouldn't want me staying in her place too long. Provided I have spent enough time with her beforehand, and send her daily reports/vids/photos of my voyages in the East, she might well prefer it to me dragging her out of the house in the cold. I get that. But she won't want me to go because 'planes drop out of the sky' (actual quote) or some such reasoning. She will undoubtedly freak as she did about Oz and New York, because she freaks about absolutely everything. She is of Europe and as far as she is concerned, Europe is where you find everything approved by sensible people, e.g Fashion, history, beauty, good food. If you need anything else, you're just being contrary. So getting this across to her is going to be difficult. My only way out is to arrange something with my brother in case of emergency and not mention it to her till we are about to go.

I will think about this another day.