The Bloody Wonderful Quiet

Like a fool I did something my mother actually wanted. She never wants Xmas presents from me, and plays up with proper histrionics if I send her something she doesn't want. I have told her that she is 'graceless' when it comes to presents but OK, I do get that her mortal fear of monkey pox means she has conniptions at the idea of opening boxes that have been through the post etc. So when she wants something, I tend to get it for her out of sheer relief. This year she wanted some book called Healing is Voltage. As I consider that even she is safe from somehow sending 5000 volts across her own ears, I got it for her. Oh that I hadn't.

She started reading it yesterday, and I instantly got a text saying
'You are never to have a mammogram again.'
I just wanted to scream Oh for god's sake shut up! Shut up!
She just piles on the agony.
Apparently I could just have ultrasounds instead and the EE is less convinced by mammograms and and and

All this on top of her major fury about me having vaccinations and going to Vietnam. Lordy, I am the girl with all the gifts.

I should laugh off her terrible bogus quack-infused advice and I will, but I can't quite do it yet. In fact I have left my phone in another room so I can't look at it for fear that doing so will just drive me to actual tears. The illness possessing her would have me dead, no doubt, no hyperbole, thoroughly dead by now if I had ever listened to her words, and I know that I deserve a thorough kicking if I take seriously a single thing she says, or rather - because she cannot be totally alone - I need to sort out some decent emotional armour so I can shrug off the nonsense. I thought I had enough, but she is corrosive and relentless. My brother's form of support for me is to chat often about stories and stuff to lift my spirits. But he won't converse much with her, he won't take that pressure off, because who can bear it and stay calm? And what good does it do for both of us to be unhappy?

Then, comes my stern sensible self saying this is your fault, why did you tell her about it at all? You knew what she was like...You know she can't help it. And my thoughts are a jumble there, full of good intentions, but let's face it, maybe I was too tired and frightened of what was happening to front up a lie, maybe in the moment I was locked into the fact of the matter. I couldn't make something up just then, could not play out some strategy around her. I just didn't have anything in me with which to be clever and inventive, and really I shouldn't have to think in those terms all my life.

And here I am, a bit miserable but mostly very tired. I have work to do today, maybe it will help me I cannot focus yet. God this must end soon! When I am on that plane, I am going to enter a world far away from all this. Then I'll come back and it will be time for business, and I'll close my eyes for a while on that operating table. And the quiet will be bloody wonderful.